The Sound of the Third Season

by Jason BirchmeierVeteran DJs Sven Väth and Richie Hawtin commemorate their summer-long residency at Cocoon in Ibiza with The Sound of the Third Season, a relatively straightforward mix of techno with a creative twist. Since the mix is intended as a commemoration of the many Monday nights Väth and Hawtin spent together in Ibiza at Cocoon, as discussed and pictured in the liner notes, the two intersperse sampled dialogue throughout the mix as a means of better capturing the essence of the summer. This dialogue surprisingly doesn't intrude upon the mix at all, instead functioning as a sort of frame for the album: you begin the 75-minute album in the airport and then sit down for dinner among numerous party-bound individuals with an array of puzzling foreign accents; after a few minutes of this chit-chat, the music begins; dialogue creeps into the mix here and there, but doesn't really rise to the fore until late in the mix when you head off to the beach for the after-party; then, following a few down-tempo after-hours tracks, the album closes with "Closing Thoughts...," a brief 20-second clip of fittingly druggy Ibizan rhetoric. Of course, though these snippets of dialogue bring a bit of novelty to The Sound of the Third Season and make it more than just another Ibiza album, the mix itself is what's most impressive. Granted, though Väth and Hawtin don't really do anything particularly fascinating during their mix, unlike what you'd perhaps expect from Hawtin in particular, their mix is nevertheless amazing. They throw down numerous great tracks (too numerous to list) and don't do anything too fancy -- just mix one kick-ass track unmercifully into the next. The heart-racing intensity doesn't subside until the last quarter of the mix, when you're at the after-party on the beach, where Väth and Hawtin open with Swayzak's soothing "Make up Your Mind (Slight Return)" and bring the mix to a lulling close.