Let's face it -- electronic music is not the next big thing. It's already the big thing and the overwhelming amount of compliation discs that are being released proves it.

Virgin Records has pretty much got a monopoly on all the really good electronic stuff because they own Caroline Records, an "indie" (it's really just a division of Virgin that appears to be an indie) with a bunch of other smaller labels beneath it. Why's that matter? Oh, only because one of those smaller labels is Astralwerks, the source of 90% of all great electronic artists.

It was Astralwerks who compiled the incredible soundtrack for Sony's Playstation title, Wipeout XL and is home to such tech-giants as the Chemical Brothers, Future Sound of London and Massive Attack among others. You'd imagine Future would be awesome straight through.

Not so. It happened with the psychedelic explosion of the late '60s, the disco inferno of the mid- '70s, the new wave of the early '80s and the modern rock onslaught of the early '90s, and it's already happening with the electronic revolution of the new millenium. You know, that insidious third-rate schlock that's packaged as the real thing, but is actually suck-core. Yeah, you have to sort through a whole lot of shit to get to the truly good stuff.

Over two discs and two hours, there's probably about 45 minutes of geniunely good music. And it doesn't come in the form of "Extremis," a badly- composed, shambling attack on peace featuring the whispery rap vocals of Gillian Anderson, star of TV's X-Files.

Nope, you have to dig a bit deeper than the first couple of tracks to finally arrive at FSOL's "Smokin' Japanese Babe" and the Chemical Brothers' genius waxwork, "Loops of Fury." In fact, most of the stuff you actually might want to listen to is on disc two, which houses the majority of the collection's great music. Take all the Brian Eno tracks, William Orbit's terrificly jelly-like "Water From a Vine Leaf," Fluke's "Absurd (Landslide Mix)" and Air's "Spiritual Invocation," and you've got ambient dance tracks that blow the lid off Dance Party '97.

Had the compilers been a bit more selective, they would have found that one disc would have been more than enough to make up a beautiful tech release. That's just not how it actually happened.

-Ryan Schreiber