Friday Beats - Sasha - "Involver"

I love a good mix CD. For those of you who don't know, a Mix CD is when a DJ takes about 10 to 20 songs and mixes them into a continuous mix, as he or she might do on the dance floor (in fact many of the best Mix CDs have connections to a specific club, like the Fabric and Fabriclive series). The attempt is to recreate what one does on the dance floor with a few caveats. You only get between 70-80 minutes on a CD and you get 3 or 4 hours on a dance floor, so naturally you have to compress it (a few CD series use Double CDs, such as the Global Underground. Most of Paul Oakenfold's Mixs are also Double disks, which I feel adds very little).

Sasha's Involver is a somewhat different beast than the normal Mix CD. He only has 10 tracks, and each of them he remixed heavily before bringing into this mix. I only have familiarity with a few tracks here away from this mix, but you can certainly hear the difference on those tracks. In general he seems to have smoothed them out, taken them down to a sound closer to his roots in Trance. This isn't really a trance mix, per se (and honestly I'm not an expert on genre differentation anyway), but there is a bit of the smoothness, the coolness I associate with Trance.

What I love about this mix is how it flows in and out. There are several bits, particularly the opening track (Grand National's "Talk Amongst Yourselves" and UNKLES ("What Are You To Me") where the mix pushes itself in the foreground and I hum along. But for much of the mix it sits comfortably in the background, grooving up my mind but not forcing itself on me. It's a mix I'm very comfortable playing with friends around, because it will just flow along, adding enjoyment with out derailing conversations.

But then another wave flows up and you realize you are bobbing your head to it again.

It's hard to find a video for a Mix CD as you might imagine, but here is a video using one of the Remixes of songs on this album (Petter's "These Days") - called Symphony for the Stoned. It's a collection of pictures set to trance music.



Anyway well worth seeking out.