Anyone still with me?

24. Transient Waves - Sonic Narcotic. This is one of the more aptly titled albums in recent memory. The similarities between this album and Sigur Ros' "Agetis Byrjun" are fairly startling. Both were released on Fat Cat, and it makes you wonder whether the SR mini-phenomenon would have happened at all had this TW album broke big. By the end, it's nothing but repeitive washes of reverb, dreaming sighs and moanings, and if you listen carefully, you can hear Sonic Boom wringing his hands in the background and muttering "damn, I wish I'd written this record". Although, given TW's clear Spacemen 3 idolation (they even contributed to the S3 tribute album a few years ago), you could argue that he did write it after all. B, $3.00, E.

25. Various - Rewind: 1984 Chicago. Superbly mixed by Rick Garcia, this is a wild run through twenty four tracks from the dawn of house music time. There are several classics here, but I had never heard well over half of the tracks before this. Not like it matters, because almost all house music sounded the same in those days (with the soothing, supple tones of Larry Heard as the exception -- to this day nobody sounds anything like him). Therefore, all this material sounds tremendously dated ... but who cares? It's *old school* house, and it's the shit. For fresh beats and sounds, don't look here. For insane amounts of fun, come on over. B, $5.95, E.

26. Empirion - Advanced Technology. Empirion failed to make a big splash with their debut album, despite releasing it at the peak of the electronica hype and being fresh off remixing the Prodigy. I can see why: its acid loops and super long tracks are far too techno for the coffee shop electronica crowd whose experience extends barely beyond the MTV Amp collections. But for the technoheads, there's not much new here either: acid loops, super long tracks, basic 4/4 beats; and few buildups, hooks, or moments of high intensity that make dancefloor fodder exciting. Hyping it on the basis of the "classic" "Narcotic Influence" didn't mean anything, because it meant nothing to the coffee shop crowd and was old hat to fans. It was never that great a track anyway. Take away that one sample and it'd never be remembered. D, $0.83, L.

27. Steve Reich - Reich Remixed. Let's get this straight: almost nothing here sounds anything like Steve Reich. This is the answer to the expected question, "how can one possibly remix a minimalist composer?". A typical remixer would sample a few seconds of a Reich composition and loop it into an entirely new track composed by them. Wrap it in a bow, call it a remix, and there you go. Those remixers further to the experimental left can find a way to make Reich's original work more of the focus of the remix. Guess what? The latter kind produce far better results here. Tranquility Bass throw together bits of several Reich tracks, and the epic end result sounds remarkably like a long lost Orb track. And Nobukazu Takemura gets in the minimal swing of things, looping melodies together in proper Reich fashion. A, $5.95, M.

28. Various - Dance to the Underground. This CD came with an issue of Muzik mag earlier this year. It features the hugely hyped new breed of "dancepunks", with acts such as The Rapture, Le Tigre and Black Dice, all mixed into a 40 minute dancefloor funk by DFA. It's a fun slab of dirty house, but the rock elements are nearly stripped completely away since many of the tracks are remixes (done for precisely that effect). I'll should probably reserve passing judgement on the whole genre until I hear the Rapture's album. But I should point out the obvious: nothing the dancepunks are doing is new in any way. I doubt that any of them have the guts to go dark and creepy while retaining their danceable flavour (like the Joy Division reincarnate moments on the Colder album). And if this is dancepunk , then so is Porter Ricks' "Spoil" -- try and top it if you can. B, $3.00, M.

29. X-Press 2 - Muzikizum. I lost track of X-Press 2's career shortly after their Junior Boys own period several years ago. They've retained a healthy career among the club crowd, which didn't surprise me since they were always a no-nonsense, "we'll house you" crew. I was surprised (relieved? joyed?) to discover that they're still so great. Bouncy, fun, more hooks than a meat locker, and storming beats that make you forget what you're doing and get up and dance. Old school, new school, completely uninitiated, it just doesn't matter. Anyone who has spent more than ten minutes of their life in a danceclub should love this record. A, $1.46, E.

30. Various - Volume Four. The Volume series from the early-to-mid 90's are sorely missed. The CD's were busting at maximum capacity with 80 minutes of exclusive music in each issue. The M.O. was twofold: showcase rare or alternate versions of songs by known bands, as well as brand new recordings by unknown bands (for instance, Garbage's debut recording appeared on a Volume compilation). Comps never used to include both electronic and indie music, but Volume did right from the outset. Plus, with a 192-page booklet containing interviews and laugh interludes such as the immortal "Diary of Dave Stewart's Beard" and "Running Up That Hill With Kate Bush", the Volume comps were a great entertainment bang for the buck. But until this purchase, I'd never owned one (discounting "Wasted", a compendium of dance tracks from the Volume comps. It featured a brand new Orbital track. I couldn't resist).

I had a great moment in high school when those of us who listened to cool music were hanging out with a bunch of people who certainly did not and managed to sneak Volume Four onto the CD player, play the Aphex Twin track, and freak out to it in the living room. You had to take what you could get back then. Normally, we would only hear thirty seconds of one of our songs before ten people would hijack the stereo and put on Guns N Roses instead. Most of what I remember about high school parties involves slipping music onto the stereo while everyone's guard was down and getting away with it.

There's a lot of solid stuff from the big names here (The Fall, Aphex, Stereolab), and the heart-melting piano version of "My Insatiable One" by Suede, which recalls one of my fave Suede songs ever, the piano version of "The Living Dead" which was ALSO a throwaway on a free cassette that came with an issue of Select. Suede shouldn't bother with a series of gigs where they play each of their albums start to finish, they should do some gigs and play ONLY PIANO VERSIONS. But there's also many fine tracks from bands that never made it, and much of it is lo-fi and lovely post-shoegaze dreampop. 1993 was such a good year for music. This CD is a great reminder of that. C, $3.95, E.

31. Laika - Sounds of the Satellites. The second Laika album fits somewhere between the multi-genre melting pot of their debut and the rhythmic whimsy of their third. It wanders between Laika past and future, never quite sure of where it is going. B, $3.95, L -- because I liked their other albums more. It's a bit unfair to compare this to an album they had yet to make, but hindsight's a bitch. Then again, Laika albums are complex and can take some getting used to, but I've gotta go with the first impression and I've got another thirteen CD's to go.

32. DJ Shadow - The Private Press. Speaking of first impressions, when I first heard "Lost and Found", I thought it was incredible but had to stop just short of reverence. It was like nothing I'd heard before, but I knew it wouldn't change my life. Fast forward a few years, and "Endtroducing" blew all sorts of minds. It's still regularly cited as one of the greatest "dance" albums ever. It was never duplicated, in part because it's such a difficult record to make. No regular schmo can construct something so complex. Shadow didn't want to either, distancing himself from the triphoppers and sticking to hip hop, like on this album. But "Endtroducing" had a near-magical, cinematic quality in every track, a feeling which is missing on almost all of "The Private Press". Like I said, Shadow was all about the hip hop at this point (there's even rapping on this record, albeit by the frequently awesome Lateef the Truth Speaker), and that's OK. With this straight-ahead approach, not too much reaches out and grabs me here. I guess we can safely pass the instrumental hip hop torch to RJD2, whose "Deadringer" rocked my ass seven ways from Sunday, approximately five times more than "The Private Press" did. A, $1.43, M.

33. Doldrums - Desk Trickery. Less bizarre than the blurb on the cover of this advance copy seemed to promise (the album was actually released in 1999). Electric guitar fed through computer? I'm there. The guitars emerge from the computers still sounding like guitars, but the more chaotic the sampling and looping, the better the track. If Doldrums ever lost all of their "mountain jam" tendencies and just noisily wigged out completely, then look out below. D, $1.52, M.