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.

In the late 1980s, as American house and techno imports flooded Britain and the Acid House movement was sweeping the nation, brothers Paul and Phil Hartnoll were busy building Britain's own interpretation of the sound. Named for the illegal "Orbital" raves taking place around the M25, they dragged their equipment from party to party, playing live PAs of their homegrown dance music to enthusiastic crowds of revellers. Their 1990 single "Chime" was (and still is) the anthem of many a British raver, and their self-titled 1991 debut remains a classic. Opening with the exquisite mid-tempo anthem "Belfast", and containing the "Chime", "Satan", and "Fahrenheit 303" singles, this album captures the innocence and energy of the nascent rave scene. -Matthew Corwine.

It may come as a shock to the purists, but after two albums of pushing abstruse drum & bass to minimalist and epic extremes, the East Anglian producer has thrown a heap of new sounds onto his percussive palate. To some, Solaris is going to sound like a chicken in search of a roost: both "Can't Come Down" and "Mine To Give" are pure 1988 old-school Chicago house. The latter even features that era's legendary vocalist, Robert Owens. "Terminus" and "Junk" pay loose homage to the nu-school breakz template, while "Halogen" and "Lost Blue Heaven" are beautifully poised, damaged electronic torch songs. There's even some drifting ambience too. But what's missing in terms of coherence is more than made up for by the visceral power of Photek's production. Intense, stripped back and wielding more brute force than Leftfield's "Swords", there's a menacing beauty at work here that reinforces Photek's reputation for tingling sonic sculpturing on a grand scale. -Calvin Bush.

It's hard to know where to start, with such a dazzling body of work as Warp's third Tenth Birthday celebration compilation, but suffice to say that at the turn of the century, few documents come as close to defining the international musical avant-garde as Remixes. Label bosses Steve Beckett and Rob Mitchell offered twenty-five international recording artists the chance to remix a track of their choice from Warp's entire ten year history, and such is everyone's evident enthusiasm that there's barely a bad track on here. High points, then, are hard to pick, but it's a disservice to ignore Four Tet's choppy restructuring of Aphex Twin's sprawling ambience on the ever-awkward "Untitled", John McEntire's warm, whistling patter around Nightmares On Wax's "Playtime" and Mogwai's defiantly individual remix of Link's "Arcadian", which consists of them completely ignoring the original and weaving an instrumental web of beautiful clarity. Much, much else beside, though. -Louis Pattison Once upon a time, a remix was an attempt by a producer to make a track more danceable-to pump up the bass, drop an infectious tambourine loop over the steady 4/4 rhythm, and add some echo to spark the crowd's buzz. But in the hands of the Intelligent Dance Music crowd-the style, pioneered by Warp Records, of applying dance-floor technologies to armchair music-the remix took on the in-joke mentality of a postmodern literary trickster. Tracks-not songs, tracks (if they started off as songs they inevitably got turned into tracks)-were pulled inside out, pushed through a filter that replaced beauty with noise and wrung it out to dry. The two-CD remix portion of Warp's 10th anniversary series takes this aesthetic as far as it can possibly go. This is contrariness squared. Oval applies his patented skipping-and-stripping CD methodology to Squarepusher's jittery drill and bass. [+]

The Ministry of Sound take us Back to the Old Skool once more with the second volume of their nostalgic house compilation. From vocal house classics such as CeCe Peniston's "Finally", Blue Pearl's "Naked in the Rain" and Robin S's "Show Me Love" to acid house faves LFO, D Mob and Altern 8, via former chart smashes from the likes of Rozalla, Snap, Sub Sub and the Shamen, you might not remember the titles or artists, but every track brings back fond memories. Spiral Tribe, Castlemorton, smiley faces, Global Hypercolour T-shirts, whistles, white gloves and a nation of clubbers discovering ecstasy-all neatly summed up in 40 tracks. What is even more astonishing is the staying power of some of the tracks present, Future Sound of London's "Papua New Guinea", Chad Jackson's "Hear the Drummer Get Wicked" and King Bee's "Back by Dope Demand" still get dropped into sets the length and breadth of the country to be met with a collective sigh of familiarity, without sounding dated in any way. And to think they thought it was all just a passing phase. -Helen Marquis.

He might have made his name as one of the founding fathers of electroclash, but Montreal-based DJ Tiga's contribution to the DJ Kicks series proves he's got a range and talent to outlive the genre. Rather than choosing the obvious genre-defining tracks, he's hunted out some stellar remixers from the field of punk-funk and electro-pop: there's Adult twisting Jolly Music's "Radio Jolly" into a gothic pulse, DFA recasting Le Tigre as shrill disco maidens on "Deceptacon", and Trevor Jackson adopting his Playgroup guise to reinvent Chromeo's "You're So Gangsta" as a digital funk number, vibrating with stuttering electronic pin-drops, and splashed with a comfy burst of saxophone. Tiga is, it had to be said, still one for the occasional 1980s fashion crime-resurrecting Stevie V's "Dirty Cash" for the new millennium is a thoroughly gruesome idea, and the very idea should be put wherever they put Flock of Seagulls. But he makes a remarkably good case for the rehabilitation of many of the hallmarks of the decade of excess: take Codec & Flexor's "Time Has Changed", for example, which revisits the mood of electronic melancholy once perfected by Depeche Mode but casts it within a thoroughly modern-sounding framework of glitchy futurism. -Louis Pattison.