Half the appeal of techno is its delightful obscurity. I feel that my "cool" quotient has gone off the scale since I was finally capable of distinguishing "house" from "jungle" and "drum-n-bass" from "ambient". It happened about a week ago, and not without breaking a sweat. It's frontier, difficult to understand, even more difficult to enjoy, and it takes itself way too seriously. It's what they're starting to call "electronica."

As far as digital obscurity goes, The Prototype Years takes the cake. My brain simply does not have the capacity to fully comprehend phrases like "miniscule raw breakbeat fusion..." from the liner notes. I get that Grooverider is a DJ that everybody loves and this is a compilation of tracks related to his greatness thru his label partners, peeps, et cetera. Pleasingly, somehow, what you see is what you get. You get some spastic and barren drum-n-bass/ jungle tracks with very little obvious human influence. Stretched samples, floating notes, sandpaper- dry drums and a tripped- out interpretation of a house song from a parallel dimension. Yeh. It's lean and mean, hardly sparing a beat for a good dance. The traditional techno- phat beatness has been supplanted by neo- jazzy sample layerings over percussive storms moving rapidly for the coast.

My friends and I sat around last weekend at 4:30am listening to this loud over some beers. We talked and laughed, but deep down knew that the tunes were ahead of the pack, truly experimental, crest of the wave, so to speak. That didn't make me want to listen to it over and over again, just say, "Hmm... that's interesting," and put it back in the stack. It ain't easy and it ain't for everybody. Fresh a requirement? New? Cool? These are important considerations, my friend, and I suggest you make them wisely.

-James P. Wisdom