"‘R U OK' is the breakthrough single from Brooklyn-based producer Ambivalent, who here pays homage to the more indulgent aspects of clubland with his tongue firmly planted in cheek. As maniacal as it is euphoric, ‘R U OK’ revels in a vague aura of creepy uneasiness with the oh-so-memorable vocal backed by wiggly synth lines, impeccably programmed bouncy ball basslines and a queasy sine-wave melody that ties it all together, making you stop to think, “Maybe I should try another…” Without doubt, 'R U OK' was a true high point for M_nus in a year filled with excellent releases." - Carl Ritger

“The mysterious Hugh Betcha on Pan-Pot's newest single most likely takes his name from Canada's sketch comedy masterpiece 'SCTV.' Betcha hosts 'Night Gallery,' an apt name for the type of atmosphere that 'Charly' creates over its nine minutes. The track is a cocaine narrative that hits its first climax as Betcha's partially obscured pitched-down vocal clearly intones "Hits your brain like some kinda ego-driven train." The train in question is undoubtedly the chugging melody, rising ever upward in an inexorable, entrancing loop. That ego? The steady hi-hat laden beat. Your brain? Your brain. 'Charly' just may be Pan-Pot’s best yet.” – Todd L. Burns

“This song is so CUTE! I want to make videos of it and put them on YouTube with "AWWWWWW!!!!1111!!" as the title. I want to pinch its cheeks and pat it on the head. But mostly I just can't get it out of my head. This is the definition of catchy and catchy is good in dance music.

There's all sorts of bad stuff you can say about this song—it’s a derivative retread of Wideboys circa 'Sambucca', the phrasing is plonkily 4/4, it's for knife-wielding Northeners—but that's all pretty much irrelevant when compared to the mighty unstoppable force that is its powerful bass, itchy beats and IRRESISTIBLE vocals—all helium-filled and with touches of Todd Edwards choppiness. Even if you hate this song with a passion (and I'm sure there are plenty of Burial-loving fun-haters who do) you'll still be able to sing it. And next time you're a little under the influence and it comes over the system, you'll probably sing along.

And if you do like this and have a bit of spare time on your hands, do some digging and listen to some UK Garage compilations from 2000 and meditate on the times when the underground was pop and vice versa. They were good times.” – Jacob Wright

"If you like dub techno but find it’s a bit—I dunno—samey, then this is the record for you. Jichael Mackson, the Munich spoonerism responsible for the towering twenty-minute acid vs. dub cut ‘Tee Trinken In Braunen Salon’ in 2005, here mixes sleek and appealing dub techno into – get this – Chris Isaak. ‘Wicked Game’ to be exact. Sounds like sacrilege, I know - you can almost hear the bedroom boys squealing “You can’t do that! Basic Channel would never do that!”, which is all part of its sly appeal. But mostly it just sounds good, with Isaak’s familiar guitar arriving out of nowhere as a dreamlike backwards sample that would do Axel Willner proud, before the track resolves as cheekily plucked guitar notes pasted over rolling-on-again dub techno. One of the best records of 2007.” - Jeremy Armitage

“Two Of Us’ is the unmitigated club banger from Save the World, one to reassure the faithful with its industrial clatter and filmic proportions. Even here though, just as you’re sensing familiar techno territory, Mayer and Superpitcher introduce an eerie glockenspiel motif more Freddy Kruger than Fabric. It brings a wonderfully light touch to the heaviest track the duo have yet put their name to and elevates this release alongside the best tracks from their forthcoming album, all of which confound expectations with unusual textural shifts.” – James Poletti

“‘Fed On Youth’ is built over a devastating rhythm that steamrolls everything it its path. The reverb-flecked chords create a palpable sense of tension, the rinsed snares snap the rhythm to attention, but that’s before Dear throws a serious curveball into the mix by coating zips of raw synth drones on top of it all. It’s a chaotic effect, to be sure, but used properly, this track is capable of grabbing the room by its neck and pulling it physically into the peak hours of the night. A wonderful track from a producer who only seems to get better with age.” – Carl Ritger

“Jeez, waiting for this to get a release was like torture. No doubt the long wait was due to a squabble behind the scenes with every label and his dog wanting to put it out, but Cocoon finally emerges from the scrum with the ball, an outcome which couldn’t be more appropriate really because ‘Magic M’ slots right into the Frankfurt label’s crowdpleasing melodic minimal aesthetic very nicely. Which is not to say that the cut is obvious, on the contrary, each part—the twitchy rhythm, the wiggling bass, the bells—is pitched just so, and unlike Aquilina’s previous 12” ‘Feeling Plastik’, which also had great elements but couldn’t quite build them into a payoff, here all the parts lock together into a satisfying peak, which unexpectedly arrives very early, before the track revolves and rotates around the ballerina music box motif until close. It’s a winner.” – Jeremy Armitage

“This is the one with the accordion in it. It's being played at every party you go to and it's causing a bit of a stink because accordions are not exactly techno, are they? It's also got a man making monkey noises on it, and it's really catchy, which means that now that everyone is playing it, it's going to start annoying the shit out of people very, very soon. A bit like 'Geht's Noch?' or 'Erotic Discourse' did. But to be fair, I promised I wouldn't write this review until I'd heard 'Heater' out. Unfortunately, I got my chance in Berlin, where the track had the awkward effect of making all the white people in the room suddenly dance whiter. Club Weekend turned into an old worlde barn dance, with woodcutters jigging with milkmaids for six minutes. Hmm. Overall then, 'Heater' is a fun little listen, but dancing to it makes you feel like an idiot.” – Jeremy Armitage

“Legend has it that the guy who invented the blues sold his soul to the devil to get a better guitar sound. I firmly believe that Kerri Chandler has done some similar voodoo for his drum machine. On ‘The Invaders (The Panic)’ the kicks sound like sasquatch feet, thundering, shaking the concrete. And like Sydenham’s ‘1985’ remix, this isn’t a rollercoaster, it’s a sleek and streamlined express elevator, with consistently rising riffs until Kerri proceeds to give us what we need with an unexpectedly acidic finish. It’s big, it ain’t small.” – Jacob Wright

“For its immediacy, its impact and its incredibly subtle yet kicking beat programming, nothing could touch the ‘Deltas’ EP by Len Faki. ‘Rainbow Delta’, the A, is what I played to all of my indie-lovin’ pals standing on the verge of crossing over who asked me, hesitantly, ‘what is minimal techno?’ Or at least, I would have if one did. ‘Rainbow Delta’ is a hard-arsed barrage of dry, hard drum hits, and then some (and then some more). Listen closely and the whole formation is constantly shifting gears, dropping in new loops every couple of bars and slowly upbuilding the whole number into a drumsynth armoury that would pulverise floors if it wasn’t sharp enough to fillet them. Piece by part there’s nothing that original here, but when everything’s been executed with this much finesse (and on such a big canvas), who cares? As I wrote earlier, this is “big room techno for the new school, with a heart pounding for the old”, and one of the key reasons why minimal techno was one of the comeback kids of 07. Massive, beautiful track.” – Peter Chambers

“Picture yourself on a remote island in the Pacific between South-America and Asia. You stand on an immaculate beach. A warm breeze is dizzying your senses. The sun is glimmering in the ocean. Yes, that's exactly the way this track feels. Four years have passed since Luciano had his first release on Perlon. With ‘Fourges et Sabres’ the Swiss-born artist returns to Zip's label and once again shows his appetite for warm dance tracks with a cinematic appeal. A continuation of the spirit of the ‘Father’, Luciano’s 2006 collaboration with Thomas Melchior, ‘Fourges…’ is an exotic incantation, this time without words: Sparkling keys, whizzing synths and gentle melodies are subtly entwined over a brooding bassline. The track never loses balance and keeps up the suspense for its whole fifteen minutes. I guess time just flies deep down in the Pacific.” - Björn Schaeffner

“As a producer, Martin Buttrich has clawed his way up to the higher echelons of estimation, which is quite a feat considering no one had really ever heard of him two year ago. After taking the top slot in RA’s 2006 Top Tracks poll with ‘Full Clip,’ this year perhaps his best track was ‘Hunter’ on the mighty Cocoon. Constructed with many elements that make slight appearances and quick exits, ‘Hunter’ is really all about the dirty, growling, all-encompassing bassline, which like Buttrich’s other track, needs to be appreciated unless on a full club system. If you have not had the pleasure to experience it yet, put your trainers on, get out this weekend, and be prepared to pop like the cork from your New Year’s Eve bottle of bubbly.” – Christopher Thomarios

“’Don & Sherri’ pulls off the neat trick of satisfying both dance heads and pop fans, which is no easy task. His gruff '80s-inflected vocal might be an acquired taste, but the layered techno in the instruments more than makes up for it. At 3.24 it's a case of shoehorning a dance track into a pop format, but if there was any justice in the world, you'd hear this on the radio instead of Britney or Whitney. Matthew Dear creates big, memorable tracks with exquisite production and personality, and he's getting better at it all the time.” – Mohson Iqbal

“Wahoo’s remix of ‘Hang Around’ made it onto five or six mix compilations this year, and deservedly so. Georg Levin and Dixon took Westbeech's white-guy-doing-Mayfield falsetto and turned it into something that harkened back to the spirit of the new romantics, albeit with a V6 Detroit techno engine rumbling under the hood. This track is what the so-called deep house resurgence in 2007 was all about, recalling both the memorable bass bounce of vintage analog heroes like Kerri Chandler and Masters At Work but delivered with a seriously modern techno twist.” - Sean-Michael Yoder

“The soul of 'Walk Music' is an aural apparition: a backwards tape edit which will raise the hairs on the back of your neck. This ghostly refrain is punctuated by a fiercely plucked bassline, delicate pads and mourning string swells which pass by like a car on a highway. It all adds up to a haunting and elegant deep house experience. As with many Schwarz productions, 'Walk Music' is meticulously constructed from choice timbres, but it's solid enough to move more deeply-inclined dancefloors. It might have flown under the radar after its March release, perhaps because relatively few DJs were able to integrate such a complicated and musical track into their sets, but that doesn't diminish its standing as one of 2007's best tracks and a high point for Henrik Schwarz himself.” – Steve Mizek

"Plucked off Justice's somewhat disappointing longplayer, 'D.A.N.C.E' was Ed Banger’s ticket to world domination in 2007. 'We Are Your Friends' had its doubters, but 'D.A.N.C.E' was the real deal: catchy without being irritating, club-savvy rather than simply club-conscious. Built from a sickly sweet children's choir straight from Sesame Street, the track riffed on pre-court case Michael Jackson hits like ‘P.Y.T’ and ‘ABC’ with Auge and de Rosnay even outgunning Noze in the oddball lyric stakes: I mean, was there a more purile-but-fun lyric than "Do the D.A.N.C.E, 1 2 3 4 Fiest!" in 2007? Don't think so. A perfect melding of pop, disco and house, ‘D.A.N.C.E’ also crossed over, no doubt thanks to a rad SoMe vid on YouTube where the Gallic pair strut along in the coolest t-shirts ever...only 5 million views and counting. For extra fun, 'D.A.N.C.E' has a big rendezvous at the Grammys in February. My money is on it, fer sure." - Tami Fenwick

“You could almost hear the dancers asking each other: “Is that a new Carl Craig remix?” Sure, ‘Can You Relate?’ has C2’s influence in its very bones, but Samuel L Session’s breakout track easily holds its own alongside classic Detroit anthems. Paris the Black Fu from the Detroit Grand Pubahs drawls the lyrics on the main mix, but the instrumental version on the flip is not to be ignored either, creating plently of space for the dramaturgy to unfold. And unfold it does. Ramping tension up with a slow dark pad, Samuel L. turns the track from a gentle breeze into a hurricane, before the eye of storm passes over the track in the breakdown. Yes, Mr. Session, we can relate. The only problem I’ve got is you served up just two releases in 2007. More of this, please.” - Philipp Cerfontaine

“Efdemin’s ‘Just a Track’ marked the moment where the formerly cryptic influence of deep house on Dial’s sound-signature became an openly expressed homage—and considering that ‘07 was the year that Dial broke, it’s a significant moment. But homage how? Efdemin’s take on the deep roots of the music was lightyears away from the swinging, gospel-soaked house classics of yesteryear—a low-fi snap of Larry Heard blown up until it was nothing but twelve pixels, deliberately square and aggressively digitised. No wonder it pissed him off. To me, it was all about the contrast between the incredibly spare percussive arrangement and the preachapella, which seemed to hold at distance the very thing the track was cozying up to, parenthesising the emotional impact of deep house so that the genre’s watchword would have to be re-written thus: house is a “feeling”. Like the title of Ulrich Schnauss’ album, the whole effect leaves you in a “strangely isolated place”, one where you ponder about the genre while simultaneously dancing to it. No mean feat, and certainly much more than ‘Just a Track’.” – Peter Chambers

“Roland Appel brings yet another hit to Sonar Kollektiv with ‘Dark Soldier’, a brooding, weird single-sided 12” with a real disdain for the rulebook. Beginning with dark, almost gothic strings, the cut seems to tread a path somewhere between song and track over its seven minutes. The vocals are more hippy than house, sounding a little like something out of ‘The Wicker Man’. The structure of ‘Dark Soldier’ is unconventional too: it begins with a long intro of dubbed out, sullen droning over a slow thump, the murkiness interrupted only sporadically by bursts of dramatic string stabs. Then a long jazzy break gives way to the vocal once more. But despite the weird layout, and the regal, austere feeling of this stiff piece of music, it still feels like something of a warped anthem, an early morning house music hymn. A fine release.” – Ronan Fitzgerald

“Sven Vath licensed ‘W’ for Cocoon G and you can see why. Cobblestone Jazz’s most uncomplicated, accessible track yet, ‘W’ gets the balance right, not between jazz and techno, but, unusually for DJ, between white boy funk and trance. Jonson conjures up a simple-but-oh-so-clever bassline that matches the inspiration of any of his solo records, which is complemented by a catchy-if-incomprehensible vocal from Danuel Tate and airy, subtly rising pads that make you wonder why trance is such a dirty word. Over eight minutes, it all interlocks together as if by magic, adding up to a classic builder that sounds like Cobblestone’s most structured effort yet. I once watched Mathew Jonson raise his lighter aloft in a muddy Japanese field to a moronic prog-trance set by Kasey Taylor—I’m assuming he was just horsing around, because trance proper can only wish it was good as this.” – Jeremy Armitage

“Like Basic Channel's twenty-minute epic 'Quadrant Dub' or Louderbach's 'Season 6', ‘Promises’ manages to create funk inside each bar with revolving synth riffs that sound like the movement of a hand. In fact, its rhythm might even be a little informed by 'Season 6', but that's where the similarity ends: where the Pierce track was all about surprising you with its peak, 'Promises' is about the tranced-out repetition, a la Radio Slave or Donato Dozzy. Guitar World readers beware of course: every sound on this cut is coaxed out of a machine, but somehow it does evoke the blurry, busy right hand of Lou Reed, and when the whip cracks after the breakdown, you feel like you're listening to a Detroit techno version of 'What Goes On'. Simple but amazing.” – Jeremy Armitage

“Now with ‘All the Time’ Koze has done it again, but this time the “surprise” is all about the scissors. The track itself is very 2007, it’s a bit deep house even, but what makes it great are the little slivers Koze snips out of it here and there: for the tiniest instant, clubbers are going to be startled by dead silence. It's a much more humble cut than ‘Brutalga Square’ or ‘Don’t Feed the Cat’, and it’s only five minutes long, but those little snips make it distinct enough to be essential.” – Jeremy Armitage

“Andy Stott keeps the pressure up with another exceptional emission from deepest, darkest, um, Manchester. On the A, 'Unknown Exception' is crafty beast, and 'Massacre' on the B is totally different, but just as vital, marrying a pacy 4/4 signature with a serious, half-steppa bassline, occasional drops, tecchy hi-hats and, most-impressively, a dramatic, metallic stabbing riff that revolves around your brain long after the needle is lifted. Wonderful stuff.” - Barry O'Donoghue

“By all rights, 'Lunatic Fringe' should not work as well as it does. Stefan Goldmann cuts up an uncredited choir, drops a house beat under them, adds a synth, and calls it a day. A recipe for certain disaster then – especially considering the choir seems to be completely unaware of any other element in the track. But like Villalobos and Herbert, what begins as ‘awww, look what our quirky little friend has done,’ turns by track's end into ‘holy shit, look at what our quirky little friend has done.’” – Todd L. Burns

“Chances are you’ve already heard it, but if not, rush immediately to check out ‘Hooked’. Championed by the likes of Anja Schneider, this is one of those tracks that might not sound too special to a casual techno listener, but it’s capable of making anyone who truly loves to dance giggle like a schoolgirl. There’s a wonderfully liquid run of crystal-clear notes that I might call ‘jazzy’ if that hadn’t become shorthand for ‘boring and beloved of superannuated US DJs’. It makes you want to wiggle your fingers around and close your eyes. The pulsing bassline and heavy kicks don’t hurt either. Overall it’s the sort of track you don’t want to end.” – Jacob Wright

“'Plastik' is a surprisingly simple record, but that's what makes it work. It's about the groove and attention to detail. Centred around an elastic, undulating, Carl Craig-aping synth riff that twists it way though the track, it takes its time: the bassline doesn't arrive until two and a half minutes in, but at that stage, the hook has you hooked. Spread evenly over nine minutes, this is a cool, confident track: builds and breaks are supplemented by subtle, rolling hats, a tidy off-beat percussive clangs and wandering washes in the drops. Expect it to be almost ubiquitous by the end of the summer. This is a good thing.” - Barry O'Donoghue

“Ricardo Villalobos’ megalomaniacal Fabric mix may have divided opinion, but there’s no denying the strength of some of the productions on it. The greatest of these was 'Primer…', a frenzied cacophony of whistles, stomping feet and politicised chant that feels pulled right off the streets of Santiago. Repeated whoops sweep in and out amid subtle doppler effects, as typically twisted Villalobosian strands of rhythm provide the requisite mechanised funk. A staple of his recent live sets, Villalobos voiced his displeasure at having this track, among others, stolen from under his nose and posted online, but familiarity did little to diminish its impact. As welcome at Rio Carnival as at Berghain, ‘Primer…’ was one of the oddest and most strangely satisfying productions of the year.” – Joshua Meggitt

“The ten-minute mind erasing original here is frustratingly simple, riding the typically warm Rekids drum sound and an awkward bell loop. Things shift quickly into focus when the overwhelming six-note riff barrels in, though. Immediately, the awkward loop turns menacingly addictive and the drums start to groove rather than simply bounce. Add a dash of variety to the riff, gently effect the bells (sure), turn up the clapping once in a while (duh), aaaaaand…anthem. It's a long one, sure, but Edwards justifies the sprawl and then some.” – Todd L. Burns

“Simplicity is the key on Kabale Und Liebe's ubiquitous ‘Mumblin' Yeah’, one of those anthems that's so versatile and addictive that it ends up being much more than the sum of its parts. Yes, some people may hear this and think "it's no 'Mouth to Mouth'". And no it won't make your ears bleed. But god damn does it challenge dancefloors to actually dance. Watching floors react over the ten minutes is quite odd, as one by one they are slayed by the rhythm. Eventually, by the time Sanchez is left alone on vocals in the sparsest of breakdowns, the entire club is completely hooked. It's now December and most of 2007 is behind us, but even if it were January you could predict with some confidence that very few records will equal ‘Mumblin Yeah’ this year. It's low slung, it's low key, but it's absolutely essential, and the only problem with it is that playing it once is never enough.” – Ronan Fitzgerald