The practice of playing records for large gatherings has certainly come a long way since Jimmy Saville on two old gramophones. Rotterdam’s Voorn, for 10 years a highly-respected crowd-detonator and producer of roof-raising dancefloor tackle, has pulled off a remarkable feat for this latest outing in the esteemed DJ-Mix series. Using state-of-the-art tackle he’s created two seamless mixes over two CDs, which weave over 10 tunes old and new into intricately-layered new mutants. Voorn’s micro-surgery results in new compositions as sometimes six tracks intertwine at the same time, ebbing, flowing, dropping and peaking, sometimes hitting plateaux way beyond the usual banging electronic dancefloor workout, bearing repeated listens to find out who just poked their head out.
Just a smidgeon of the roll-call only gives a hint of Voorn’s mighty achievement: Carl Craig, Basic Channel, Model 500, Cobblestone Jazz, Sascha Funke, Leftfield, Goldie, Radio Slave, Quiet Village, Ricardo Villalobos, Minologue, Ame, even the Ripperton $9 Mix of Radiohead’s Nude. Some of techno’s most familiar classics are here, such as The Martian’s Star Dancer and System 7 and Derrick May’s Altitude, but flash past as part of the infrastructure of a greater whole, which might have just set a new benchmark for mix albums.
