Music, at its finest, is a synthesis of Apollonian structure and Dionysiac abandon. It's the channeling of emotion through the structure of form. In its perfect form, music can be literally transporting. How often have I been shuffling through my local Shoppers Food Warehouse and heard the Muzak version of the Cure's "Friday I'm in Love," and been teleported from the deli counter to the teenage beginnings of my erotic journey. At other times, Chet Baker's cherubic chops have distracted me from compiling reports, airlifting me to Italian rivieras and the sensual quaffing of liters of Chianti. Quite why a junkie from Oklahoma drops me in Rimini, I can't fathom, but that's how my head is wired, I guess.

The Californian IDM label Plug Research has adapted the music-as-journey cliché. Intermission's mission is to provide brief out-of-mind respites, rather than trippy magical carpet rides. This compilation of mostly bite-size, not-too technical techno exists to offer you a momentary absence from deadlines, dilemmas, and dyspepsia. I am here to testify to the power of this product. Unlike the waitstaff-cum-bitpart-actors who shill stain-resistant ionizing floor-mops and non-irritant bum-fluff wax on cable TV, I've been using the fine Intermission product for a month, and my statistician buddy has, unknown to me, calculated a 47.89% increase in my hedonic value-matrix. And all the while, I thought I was just getting off on some pretty groovy shit.

So I can attest to having my neurological pleasure-center spiked in all the right ways. I'd previously heard David Moufang's "Cacao Facil" at MP3.com and not been all that smitten. But following on from the dusty intriguing chill-out whimsy of Unagi Patrol's "A Quick Drink," Moufang's faux-tropicalia kitsch more than sustains my inquiring. I'm rushing to discover how far Intermission will toy with sub-genres and subvert my expectation that most IDM compilations are just dour entropic representations of algorithmically manipulated waveforms.

"Super Serenade Part 2" performed by Tenants Storm Highrise (aka Jamie Hodge) is as much an exercise in modulated pausing as it is in slow-as-glutinous gravy Kenny Barron-ish Rhodes piano tinkling. Safety Scissors, fresh from imprecating Loki, the Norse god of goofing around, sings a tender glitch ballad to his never-ringing telephone. If.Then.Else's filigree "Arrange" sustains the torch-song mood evoked by "Phone." I'm intrigued-- do these guys really want their interluding melodies to be this mournful, this melancholy? Jeremy Dower's "Heart Trouble" partially answers that question. The processed saxophone melody tugs and nips like the processed vocal of Kid A or the thick melodic threads that bind Jega's Geometry.

The itchy marimba-funk of Roman Flügel's "Pardon" recalls the Blue Note electrojazz of Flügel's previous band, Alter Ego, as well as that band's recent bop-glitch incarnation as Sensorama. The track straddles the two styles and zips them up into 2½ minutes of charged excellence. For his contribution to these interluding moments, Rawell's "Cycles" imagines David Pajo's acoustic strums as a comet passing through clouds of astrogenic material. On a more terrestrial tip (and for some filthy low-end inaction), Orb collaborator Thomas Fehlmann rolls out the prowling dub of "Springer" and proves that, away from the Eric Von Daniken fantasies of Dr Alex Paterson, the other Orb-iters can produce disorienting buds of crucial stank.

Danny Zelonky, unequivocally the Richard D. James of the Plug Research roster, closes Intermission with a collaboration with Phthlocyanine's drill-n-basehead Dimitri Fergadis-- "Aftermarch" is a dissonant tour through the rehearsal rooms of a collapsing musical conservatory. After four minutes, a sufficient amount of masonry has smashed through the grand pianos to rudely truncate Zelonky's approximation of a piano étude being performed during seismic trauma. The remainder of the track consists of the fizzing and arcing of machines as they attempt to continue within operating parameters, despite being crushed by falling effigies of Mozart, Beethoven, and Lizst.

Though Intermission more than succeeds in its main aim of being "a high-speed slide-show of fresh yet familiar electronic forms," I find it remarkable for another reason. Plug Research has chosen contributors from such varied quarters, and yet Intermission is so coherent and stylistically consistent as to persuade you that it's the work of just one outfit. Plug Research have successfully figured out precisely what their signature sound is, and communicated it to artists as diverse as Roman Flügel and Dimitri Fergadis.

As we unwittingly journey into the anti-gravity expansion of the universe, we need all the Intermissions we can get before all the lights in the sky are dimmed forever and we're abandoned to the darkness without and within. Like all the Plug Research releases, this record acts as an informative vade mecum guide to the anti-entropy to come. I take Intermission twice daily for emotional release and I recommend you do the same.

-Paul Cooper