Various Artists - The Gathering
(Kog/Universal)
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This compilation is designed to showcase all of the New Zealand artists playing live at this year's Gathering, and with 14 tracks of local electronic brilliance on display, this is a good contender for local compilation of the year. It opens with Pitch Black's refined, laidback, but very dubwise 'Alternate State', and then we move into the astonishingly good 'Regaining The Steps To Recovery' by Micronism. It's a languid slice of deep breakbeat beauty, with a pure pop melody, genius!
There's also some deep trancey business from epsilon blue, FreQ, and Protean amongst others. We get some tasty organic, up front dub from Salmonella Dub, an instrumental piece of dub-hop from The Nomad, and a scorching slice of horror-step from the usually more restrained LRS, this time under his Defacto guise.
Overall, I feel the quality standards are reasonably high, and at least some of these artists are truly ready to cut it on the international stage. The rest are not far behind.
Looking forward to next year's CD already.....