So there's house for dancing and chillout for relaxing, but what if you want to unwind but not end up horizontal dreaming of the Café Del Mar? Enter Jakatta with his debut album Visions: not upfront enough to drag you onto the dance floor but certainly not drowned in contrived chillout synths and meandering downbeats. Having been DJing and making thumping music for many years under various guises, Joey Negro aka Raven Maize aka Dave Lee aka Jakatta has toned it all down and gone cinematic on us. His first hit under this moniker was the American Beauty sampling "American Dream", up-tempo and uplifting yet more ethereal than your average house tune. Much of Visions is made in a similar way, taking a good idea and running with it although depending on moods and personal taste, this can get a bit samey and start to sound like the same song repeated over and over again. The standout has to be the collaboration with Seal on "My Vision", same as the rest; nice beat, hook, bass etc but the vocal lifts it far beyond the rest of the album. -Georgina Collins.

The latest in the Northern Exposure series of trance-techno journeys undertaken by two of the most respected DJs in the world, Expeditions finds Sasha and John Digweed fashioning a set from some fine underground cuts. The disc carries the atmosphere of Jean Michel Jarre while maintaining the pace and energy of Orbital. Using Breeder's "Tyrantanic" as their warm-up, the dynamic duo seamlessly utilize simple techno beats with the likes of Jayn Hanna's "The Light," pumping after-hours house such as Mono Culture's "Free," and deliciously simple trance as in Red Devil's "Gamelan. " Maintaining the traditions of previous Northern Exposure sets, there are two different discs for slightly different moods-the first more of a late-night soundtrack, the latter a blue-sky marathon-but both work equally well sequentially or separately. Expeditions is a dynamically balanced dance journey that takes you through many of the vistas electronica and DJ culture has to offer. No phrasebook is necessary. -Steffan Chirazi.

Roger's been listening to a lot of Kraftwerk and Daft Punk lately, soaking up old German references alongside the French formula for commercial success with First Contact. "Computabank" takes us right back to the days of electro when Roger S (as he's billed Stateside) was a graffiti artist, breakdancer and architecture student. The 30-something New York producer has been slow coming round to making music. Despite being on the scene as a high profile DJ and remixer for some 15 years this is his first pure solo album. There have been singles (such as the amazing "Luv Dancin" on Strictly Rhythm to the frankly disappointing cover of Chic's "I Want Your Love" on Perpetual Records) but this time the S Man has hit all the right notes, albeit with a nose for the mainstream. This album has already given him a surprise UK No. 1 hit with the disco funk of "Another Chance" and there's perhaps a couple more top 10s in here, particularly the classic US garage sound of "You Can't Change Me", a cut well within the range of Arman Van Helden's and Masters At Work's best outings. He only really slips up on the cheesy "The Partee" where he tries to be too Latin for his own good, chasing that impossible Basement Jaxx/Ricky Martin crossover audience. A regular on the UK super-club scene and the Mediterranean isles, Sanchez should now be a permanent fixture in the charts. -Jake Barnes.

Alice Deejay are the all-female Dutch group who wooed Europe in 99 with a particularly nasty strain of trance-by-numbers. From out of nowhere, they released the singles "Better Off Alone" and "Back In My Life", atrocities that managed to infiltrate every youth club and boutique from Reading to Rotterdam. The arrogantly titled Who Needs Guitars Anyway is an album worth of similar crimes against humanity. It'll come as no surprise to hear that, of the 14 tracks here, there's little in the way of variation. Most songs (and the term is used generously) consist of dumbed-down saccharine riffs, simple, two-fingered Hi-NRG basslines and the kind of metronomic beats that would keep a hypnotist happy for years. The singing is equally loathsome, revelling in its attempts to exert cutesy adolescent angst over the anodyne backing tracks. Perky synth lines, crashing cymbals and funny whooshing noises might be all the rage at seven year old's birthday parties, but really, this kind of Fisher Price trance makes Sash! sound like Beethoven and is best avoided. -Paul Tierney.

Alex Gopher's debut is full of late-night house music in the images of smoochy jazz, Prince-styled funk and the romantic airs of 1990s revisionist disco. The most immediate tracks are party pleasers with butt-oriented beats and strident vocals demanding that you get down and get with it. Elsewhere Gopher is more considered-even melancholy-sampling Billie Holliday on "The Child" or collaborating with AIR for the intimate alt. ballad "Ralph and Katy" (a swooning track with poetic vocoderisms and fragile airs). Much of the album shows Gopher's credentials as doyen of the French house movement-like Bob Sinclair or AIR (both of whom debuted on the Solid imprint co-founded by Gopher), he makes a version of house/electronica that is metropolitan and urbane. He also holds a warm nostalgia for the lost world of Studio 54 and remakes disco as a luxurious modern music-a winning approach. -Tony Marcus As a French DJ, Alex Gopher faces inevitable comparisons to Daft Punk, France's principal exporter of urbane electronic disco. While the comparison is not unjust, YouMyBaby&I inclines more towards organic, sweaty funk than the robotic metronome beats of France's other prodigal sons. Though he is too mannered to indulge in the raucous hip-hop inflections of American electronica icons such as Fatboy Slim, Gopher is nonetheless in hot pursuit of your booty and your libido. This is most obvious on "Party People," a full-on international funk rave-up that is already a dance-floor staple in European clubs. [+]