Another year, another Total comp. I almost didn't even bother with this one, since I figured I knew what to expect and I didn't really need another two discs of this. I'm glad I did check it out, thought, because there are quite a few gems on here.

The main reason I even bothered buying this was because of the Jorg Burger track, "Modernism Begans At Home". It's basically a loungey, chilled out house cover of one of the hallmarks of early '90s hardcore rave, "Dominator" by Human Resource. What could be gimmicky instead ends up being a hilarious piece of criticism on the seriousness of minimal techno. It also works much better than the most hyped track on this album, Matias Aguato's "Minimal", which more blatantly addresses this concern. Unfortunately, the silly Spanglish lyrics don't do much to distract from what is otherwise another really boring techno track.

Fortunately, there's plenty of other quality tracks, and odd surprises, to be found on both discs of this compilation. Superpitcher makes a total of three appearances, all on the first disc, the best of which, "Disko (You Don't Care)", takes an old Soul II Soul a capella and filters the living daylights out of it to a squelching disco shuffle. Burger/Voigt (formerly Burger/Ink) turn to classic Krautrock for inspiration for their track "Wand Aus Klang", which appears to be an original track but wouldn't surprise me at all if it was a cover of Cluster or something. Dubshape offer a shimmering piece of deep Detroit-esque house, and show plenty of potential. Jonas Bering's excellent new non-Kompakt full-length is represented by its Kompakt-released single "I Can't Stop Loving You".

And so on and so forth. Two 78 minute discs of this stuff is probably too much for one sitting, but who said all of this was sitting music? Ten years in the game, Kompakt is still putting out fantastic techno records. 8/10 -- Paul Simpson (3 December, 2008)