I became intimately familiar with this label without ever buying anything, seeing as how their records remained on the record store shelf week after week. This Bedrock offshoot aimed to deliver a super-polished mix of tribal grooves, prog-house tempos and lots of wooshing and swooshing, and came up with a handful of singularly drab and uninspiring tunes. Dark drums were "in" for a while, but it seems this label was too late on the scene, as it folded up almost instantly. As an added bonus, the bizarre grey-on-black design of these records meant that if you dared to buy one of them, you'd be holding it up to your nose and squinting really hard that night up in the DJ booth.

In my humble opinion, a case of style over substance, a handful of clunkers now gathering dust.

A dreadfully boring record which exemplified the dreadfully boring tribal house sound of the early 2000's. Side A features a grinding rhythm loop which tries to be "deep" but comes off as simply limp instead. Most embarassingly, it's topped off with a gruff voice imploring the listener over and over to "feel my drums!" Oh please. The B side is a rework of Robbie Tronco's old hit "Walk 4 Me", and it does a smidgen better by adding a little shuffle to the rhythm, but layered on top are all kind of stabs and echoey bits that call to mind a bad Junior Vasquez rip-off. Too deep to inspire any kind of excitement, and un-funky enough to put you to sleep on the dancefloor. Yawn!

I'll have to agree that this mix is packed full of classics and the mixing is half-decent (for Oakenfold anyway), but the fact that this was released in the US only, at a time when albums like Paul van Dyk's "Seven Ways" were just starting to get attention, makes me think of it mostly as a well-aimed marketing tool. To hear it today, it's almost amusing, one gargantuan anthem smacking right into another, climaxing with "Gamemaster", a track you can't even play in my part of the world anymore, lest you be laughed out of town. It reads almost like "NOW That's What I Call Trance! Vol. 1", designed to crack the American market open for later series like TranceGlobalNation and TranceMix USA -- not to mention a Paul Oakenfold US tour in the summer of 1999, after the mix had been given six months to simmer. This mix is good to listen to if you want to rediscover your love of some old classics, but I just can't shake the feeling that it was more business than pleasure.