Something of an anthem in the DJ circles in which I moved during my college years, and damn well it should be. These two goofy guys, makers of goofy chopped-and-diced house with goofy track names, really hit the bullseye here. Go right for the A-side: "Regular Absorbency" jumbles up a fat squelch bass with hiccups, claps, guitar squiggles, horn honks, and voices shouting "Yeah!" and "Oh!". Even the most genteel DJ may find himself unable to resist chopping, cutting and scratching when something this funky is on the turntable. A record I try to remember to slip into the back of the bag, because it just might come in handy - 9 times out of 10, it does.

On the other end of the spectrum from the pulse and whoosh of classic Berlin-school music, there is ambient music that creates a lively space with a very limited palette, and this album hits the nail right on the head. Fans of Stars of the Lid, Mathias Grassow, and Robert Rich should absolutely take note of these gossamer meditations for guitar and laptop. No sludgy drones here, or canned ethnic samples, or new-age noodling. This CD is a triumph, and one that I return to time and time again. Through modest exhalations of tone and timbre, Mr. Sloan races past the 75-minute mark in the blink of an eye. The sounds used are so simple, but hard to pin down with words - long, pulsing notes that swell and ebb, keen and then melt into whispery puddles. Wherever you want to go - up to the highest sun-blasted heights, or deeper into the cracks of your favorite armchair, these lovely paper-thin soundscapes will get you there every time.

This looks like yet another 90's album that slipped under the radar and into the bargain bin - but why? It's a medley of pristine, head-spinning techno-trance that would give Orbital, Fluke, or Freaky Chakra a run for their money. Nimbly programmed rhythms place these tracks far away from a monotonous boom-tss groove, and big dancefloor hooks and obvious up-and-down structures are avoided too. Instead, snippets of notes and voices swirl and swoop here, there, and everywhere in a psychedelic barrage. The tracks all take a different tack - chill and housey, fast and frantic, deeply textured beatlessness - but they're all awesome. It seems that Off And Gone ceased to exist after this album, but a long list of aliases such as Floatpoint, Dreamdoktor H, Vuemorph, and Cap'm Stargazer can be mined for different, but equally compelling tuneage.

Two stellar tracks on this record, from a label that featured lots of great breaks tracks with trancey, ravey overtones. There's a bit of a look ahead to DJ Friction's future records as Voyager with the remix of "You Make Me Feel So Good", a dark and bubbling track that snaps back and forth between breakbeats and straight beats while hissing hi-hats rise and fall. But it can't even compare to the awesome remix of "Groove Me" - a fast and funky breaks track which features a thrumming bassline and a build up to one of the best piano hooks I've ever heard. Strangers will be hugged. Hands put up in the air. You'll feel glad to be alive when you put the needle on this one.

After so many long listens and late-night ruminations, this album still holds sounds to be uncovered and speaks of trips not yet taken. The full dynamic range is covered, from earthquakes and cityscapes to verdant dancefloor jams and humming drones, and the utmost musical care is audible at every turn. With every track so different and great, the whole thing adds up to an intelligent, gorgeous outer space rave-up, so strange and wonderful that it may as well have been dropped into our laps direct from a faraway planet. The booklet of stories is not that necessary... tracks like "Ehn" and "Le Soleil Et La Mer" put vivid, bursting pictures into the mind of the hopeful listener.

And to think that people heap praise on techno albums which hammer away at two or three ideas for sixty minutes... After getting our fill of those guys, we can go back and grab onto this compendium of outer-space delights, rewinding time and time again.

I just can't get enough of this album - an hour of weird, richly-spun, gossamer ambient tuneage from Australia. This guy makes emotional tracks with generous heaps of melody and wonderful swaying beats. But this is gentle, breezy stuff, as if you could imagine a bombastic Ulrich Schnauss tune drawn on trace paper and then held up to the sun. Though there's not a duff track on here, the two best ones, "Dusk Midnight Dawn" and "Universal Translator", feature bouquets of bright intertwining melodies on top of simple chugga-chugga rhythms. The final track evokes a rapid journey through cold deep space, long sustained notes with mechanical voices and exhalations, shimmers and explosions. Though the individual bits of each track come and go in unsurprising patterns, the atmospheres created are palatable in the extreme - warm, buoyant, kinetic. Popping this disc in, for me, is the musical equivalent of striding into the hyper-detailed, super-colorful universe next door.

This record was a happy accident - I bought it for one track only to fall in love with another. I played the Devilfish remix a lot in '99 when I was playing fluffy trance with a dollop of the hard stuff on top. It was typical jackhammering techno-trance that was soon gathering dust on my shelf. Then I came back to it a year or two later and found the gem on the flipside that is "This Is The Way". It's perfect hip-swinging summer's-day house with rough, punchy drums that were probably sampled from some long-forgotten funk record. Best bit is when it breaks out into some warm Detroit-style melodies in the middle while a lady's voice hollers out, "This is the way!". Totally great. Find this record, and I bet you'll be reaching for it every time you want to make one of those "feel-good" mixes.

It's tempting to file this band away as just another cheap Stereolab imitation, but that won't do. Laika blends together bits of shoegaze, blues, jazz, dub, and indie rock and drizzles them over rhythms with loungey swagger and odd time signatures. Despite the diversity of influences, nothing on this disc feels out of place, though. The warm shimmy of "Breather" flows into the dark trip-hop of "Shut Off/Curl Up", and into the squawky "Martinis On The Moon", and it all sits well together. Best of all are the last two tracks, which end the album on a lovely ambient note that makes me think of Seefeel. This could be grouped in with other female-led groups of the 90's like Lamb, Hooverphonic, and Olive, but there's a weird and playful touch here which makes you want to crank it up and listen closer.

This disc is buried back in the early catalogue of the DiN label, so it may not be familiar to many. That's too bad, because this is a stirring and imginative ambient trip in the style of vintage FAX. In fact, it reminds me a lot of the FAX classic "2350 Broadway" - extended beatless tunes with wooshes, buzzes, hums, squibbles, and the clanking and sighing of far-off machines. But where Namlook and Inoue come off sounding perhaps a little weird and bleak, these tracks are bright, confident, and free of "pretty" ambient cliches. The title track is the best of them - a strong and uplifting intro gives way to ten minutes of deep, dark drones. The machine cacophony almost gets to be too much at the end of the disc, but it's saved by one last blast of melody before gently depositing you back on planet Earth.

Another installation in the strange and highly minimal Cube series, this one featuring a beat... of sorts. After pressing play, you hear a some gauzy synth plinks and washes rise up, and then... BOOM. Are your upstairs neighbors moving furniture? Or maybe having a caber toss? And again, about fifteen seconds later, BOOM - a muffled, hazy bass kick. Soon, a ticking, rhythmic track fades up and weaves in and out of the mix. Makes me think of being tucked into the groove of a techno record, pitched down about 98%, exploring the spaces between the beats. About an hour later, after some nice tweaks and detours, everything simply fades out. A pleasant little artifact of the modern ambient age, this. Follow the artist's advice, though, and keep this on low volume, lest those super-soft textures get all blown-out and annoying. Boom!