A-Trak : Infinity +1 (Thrive Music)
James Zabiela : The Masters Series, Part 12 (Renaissance Records)
Optimo : Sleepwalk - A Selection By Optimo (Domino)
reviewed by Gaspar Oliveira for GBH.tv

Before we get going here, I ought to make something clear. I think that commercially-released mixtapes are advertisements. Forget all that stuff about sitting in your bedroom with your index finger over the pause button on your boombox or handwriting out the tracklist in multi-colored cursive or whatever else; no matter who puts its out, no matter what the context is, or which DJ has his name on the front of it, it's a fucking advertisement, pure and simple, a lure designed to draw you towards something else.

As such, it seems sensible to evaluate them as advertisements rather than pieces of art, so that's what we're going to do here. And at the risk of putting everybody off this strategy immediately, A-Trak's Infinity +1 is like the money you could be saving with Geico. It follows up on a hugely successful effort (the superior Dirty South Dance, the sole mix included in our 10 Best Records of 2007), and it carries a lot of similar baggage. Fool's Gold has grown from trendy upstart into one of the bigger underground dance labels in America, and it's co-founder A-Trak is practically a household name, provided you live off the L train in Brooklyn or in Echo Park in LA. As such, Infinity +1 plays with higher stakes, meant to appeal to a broader range of people and move more units. On paper, it seems like it should: Infinity +1 moves from fresh, caffeinated hip-house (Donnis, Kid Sister, MSTRKRFT featuring N.O.R.E.) to swooning, Italo-disco-inspired blog house (Holy Ghost!, the Golden Filter, Knightlife) and beyond, and it does so with confidence and savvy; the transitions between the hip-house tracks in particular are patient and impressive. But crucially, the whole thing feels more calculated than inclusive, like a dinner party whose seating arrangements have been painstakingly finetuned, a gathering comprised of all the people A-Trak had to invite rather than just his favorites.

If Infinity +1 shows a DJ who's trying to cast a wider net, the next two releases are plainly the work of guys who know their audiences are pretty securely established. They might not be as big as A-Trak's, but they're not going anywhere, either. The first, James Zabiela, is about as hooked up a DJ as you're likely to find, with residencies at Pacha in New York City and Space in Ibiza, plus a spot at Sacha's booking agency. At only 30, he's rightly regarded as one of the best DJs on the planet, and there's nothing left for him to prove from a technical standpoint. So his latest mix, the newest installment in Renaissance Records's highly regarded Masters Series, sells the man as an artiste, a DJ who's more than a DJ. The first of the mix's two discs, Down, floats through some seriously pretty (Near the Parenthesis, R3volve), very soft melodies (Boards of Canada) threaded together by field recordings made by Zabiela. In both mood and production, Down feels like a slightly poppier version of Boards of Canada's seminal Geogaddi, but that spell is broken by Zabiela's other contribution, a set of musings on mankind's modern loneliness. These monologues set the tone for what follows on disc two, a well-curated, if slightly static, collection of tech-house. Populated by interesting, highly musical tracks (Komytea, Paul Woolford), Up aims to distinguish Zabiela as a guru who's transcended the suffering of grinding, everyday house. And for those EDM heads who have been following Zabiela for a long time, Renaissance makes a convincing argument.

But while Zabiela and A-Trak are both inextricably tied to the dancefloor, the Scottish duo known as Optimo has made a career out of crashing the dance parties. Their previous mix effort, Psyche Out!, managed to wring club delirium out of old psych and rock records, and their newest, Sleepwalk, continues to push that image of Keith McIvor and Jonnie Wilkes as dust-covered rock gods. It's also a little too successful. This time around, Optimo are after the sound of insomnia, and they begin naturally (an ambient recording by Chris Watson), even mystically (Nurse With Wound), but it's not long before the territory gets seriously weird, full of outsider post-rock and new synthetic frontiers (Raymond Scott, Cluster). Optimo takes its time stretching away from the waking world, slowly leaving everything behind. Once those final scraps of sense and order have been punched into the pillows, however, Sleepwalk totally loses its marbles, wandering to a totally bewildered conclusion, veering from creeping Ethiopian jazz rock (Mulatu Astatqé) to toothless hillbilly music (the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band) to deeply ironic lounge nonsense (Lee Hazlewood) consecutively (and that's just one stretch. There are more). It's guaranteed to make you wonder just how many thousands of records Wilkes and McIvor must own, but occasionally it's also enough to make you wish you'd just fucking fall asleep, already. Still, as ad campaigns go, it's by far the most successful of the three. It sells a proven commodity as something you'll have to keep watching, just to see what it comes up with next.

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