Various

Easily a world leader in dance floor techno, Germany’s Kompakt label serves up a simmering 12-course treat for the ears cooked up by the various artists on this fine label. Speicher begins fairly metronomic with its 4/4 pace, picking up speed and intensity track after track until the final third where a discernible fervour is achieved. Speicher does not have the austere yet graceful minimalism that German techno is famed for. Rather there are plentiful growling synthesiser tones, sharp kick drum beats and vocal fragments that sometimes skirt uncomfortably close to Euro-House like M. Mayer’s "Love is Stronger than Pride,” but thankfully never fully crosses over. Speicher does have a pounding techno edge where smarter tracks reside like Reinhard Voigt’s "How We Rock.” For any DJ looking for a powerful dance floor track, please listen to "Before” by Ulf Lohmann. With synthesiser notes pushed to distortion levels and pile-driving beats, playing this record at a club would be the musical equivalent of driving a Mack truck through the minds of club-goers. Kompakt’s compilation is definitely the club-goers guide to better tracks for the record crates.