I found this album on a very good RateYourMusic list called † black culture ∞ - 2017; to the extent (none) that I am capable of certifying this sort of thing, it absolutely belongs. Sometime in the late 1990s (and echoing ever since, albeit in a somewhat less-inspired fashion), house people got a little tired of the whole pounding four-on-the-floor thing and decided that dance music need have no particular structure so long as it continued to draw from some sort of danceable musical tradition. There are kicks here, sure, but they're practically buried among samples from every conceivable era and expression of black music - it's one thing to try and track down an anonymous earworm from some song you heard a minute of in a mix, but another entirely to listen to a full album in which the samples feel more like in-jokes than closely-guarded secrets. American English doesn't have a word for the act of sampling the background conversation that opens Marvin Gaye's What's Going On but leaving the music itself untouched; the Brits would call it cheeky.

Every review of this thing that I can find begins with something like starts out slow, but totally worthwhile once it gets going! Sure, I guess. Beyond the total self-unawareness required to lead off a paragraph that way, in what world could that possible be a salient piece of criticism regarding an album of house music? Bad news, I guess - it does, in fact, start slow, with some slow points in the middle and a slow ending, if a fade-out counts. Luckily, this has no bearing on the actual quality of the album, which remains the only way I know of to listen to every genre of music simultaneously.

Highlights: Roberta Jean Machine (feat. Norma Jean Bell & Roberta Sweed), Runaway (feat. Roberta Sweed, Norma Jean Bell & Pitch Black City), Mahogani 9000