Panorama Bar 01

by Andy KellmanThe Ostgut label's second mix album, following André Galluzzi's Berghain 01, mirrors the strains of house music spun by Cassy at Berlin's Panorama Bar. Outside Berlin, Cassy has been known more for her spooky vocal contributions to tracks by Ricardo Villalobos ("Miami," "True to Myself"), Lucien-N-Luciano ("La Ondita"), and Luciano & Mathew Jonson ("Alpine Rocket"), as well as her own scattered production work (the excellent Perlon-released "Night to Remember," a highlight of Tobi Neumann's Fliederlieder) and remixes (Villalobos' "Easy Lee"). Panorama Bar 01 makes evident her considerable worth behind the decks. In this case, we are definitely talking about decks, not software; she put this together with a set of turntables and a mixer. Most of the tracks selected are fresh from late 2005 and the first half of 2006, while DBX's 13-year-old "Bleep" is inserted skillfully while (perhaps) unwittingly illustrating the stark contrast between what was labeled "minimal" then and what is labeled the same now. Granted, no inclusion within this 24-track program could be accused of being suffocating or as bold as a Euro-dance hit. Cassy keeps it stripped down and subtle, and it's not at the expense of pleasurable (if nuanced) sounds. The set-up allows plenty of space for the mostly unheralded deep house out of Detroit -- including Rick Wade and a Dwayne Jensen track remixed by Norm Talley -- and the techno-/micro-/minimal house centralized in Germany, two styles that rarely coexist in club sets, let alone on commercially released mixes. There's also a handful of expansive, richly shaped contributions from the eternal underdogs at Amsterdam's Delsin and Berlin's Styrax, labels that deliver melodic Motor City techno updates by D5 and Redshape. Nothing is excessive or strictly functional. It's all wonderfully efficient from a dancefloor perspective and worthy of many depth-revealing listens. If nothing else, the disc will hopefully telegraph to casual clubbers and dance music neophytes that Cassy is one of several female DJ-producers -- along with Anja Schneider, Magda, Ada, and M.I.A., to name a few -- deserving of as much attention as Ellen Allien, who seems to be the only woman within this sphere to get an appropriate amount of attention.