Triple R Friends CD

Friends allows DJ, occasional producer, label head, and journalist Riley Reinhold to step out from the shadows of Cologne's dance music scene to spin a dozen of his favorite house tracks. Kompakt's third mix album -- following Tobias Thomas' Fur Dich and Michael Mayer's Immer -- is the most up-tempo thus far, though it hardly offers anything in the aggro realm of the label's series of Speicher releases. Reinhold keeps it warm, dubby, and luxuriant throughout, basing the mix on a handful of excellent vocal tracks. Metaboman, ADA, Luciano, Schaeben & Voss, Dntel, and Oxtongue each offer productions with vocalists that sound as if they're whispering in your ear. That's the only commonality between the voices, however; queasy wheezing, elegant melodicism, seductive detachment, murmured cyborg-speak, and serenade-like soul-baring factor into the separate tracks. The soul-baring takes place during Superpitcher's remix of Dntel's "This Is the Dream of Evan and Chan," a wistful emo-house epic that fits the same role as Phantom Ghost's "Perfect Lovers" on Immer; it's the expansive climax that doesn't come until near the end of the mix. While Reinhold's mixing skills don't quite approach the mastery displayed by Mayer on Immer, the track-to-track transitions are hardly rough, and his selection and sequencing are first-rate (one unlikely but entirely fitting inclusion: Psychick Warriors ov Gaia -- disguising themselves as PWOG -- remixed by Mayer). Odds are you won't realize until it's over that he has deceptively laid down a very broad range of sounds that all fit into one category. Despite the fear-instilling title -- effusive nepotism, uh oh! -- Friends can be added as one of the best mix albums that surveys the field of early-2000s Germanic house. ~ Andy Kellman