What is it about staring vacantly into the ringing lights and flashing bells, music pounding from your eardrums to your stomach, your arms and legs flailing in neo-tribal dance, that makes it "fun"?

Perhaps it's the overwhelming of ego, the club environment stealing any possibility of even thinking in a straight line. Maybe it's the drugs. Maybe it's the sweat, the dancing, or the steam hanging on the ceiling among the rafters. Maybe it's Epidrome, Epic Records' high- positivity affirmation of club culture and music. Or maybe it really is the drugs.

Epic is proud of their support of club and house over the years "while most major labels were scurrying the opposite direction." The label has stuck with some great acts and presents to us now, on bended knee, a compilation of their music. The result is hopeful, vibrant, throbbing and sexual like good house music should be, and this is good house. Welcome To The Epidrome, while showcasing several different acts maintains a great, high- energy vibe, and what it lacks in quasi- tekno wizardry it makes up with pure enthusiastic dance that's closer to the Deconstruction label sound than it is to Ninja Tune.

Presenting a saucy mix of club standards like "Free" and surprises like "Oxygene 10," (a Jean Michel Jarre composition remixed by Sash), Epidrome belongs in a dance- friendly environment. Even as I sit here now, listening to "Don't Fly So High," my foot is twitching. And my head would be bobbing if I hadn't had my neck shortened last week for cosmetic reasons.

-James P. Wisdom