Filter: Mr 76ix, Syntaks & Shitkatapult

Filter the good stuff, cut off the rest...

>Filter: Mr. 76ix - Hits Of 76ix Part 2 (album)

Okay, I'm tardy reviewing this as it hit the shops in 1826, but this has a place here because Mr 76ix is someone who likes twiddling knobs. Here we have mad Aphex-style monster mashes, acid breaks, old skool beatbox kidnapped by robots, TV interference made good, and LFO-style atmospherics, all in all a wonderfully varied album made even better by track names such as Like Crack Whores Lapping Up Jizz. Hardcore with a heart.

>Filter: Syntaks - Awakes (album)

I don't know if Brian Eno and Boards Of Canada ever had sex, but I'd want to see the paternity test for Syntaks. This is the kind of intimate electronica you can take a microscope to, with clicks, clanks and echoes adding detail to a warm, smothering collection of sparkling ambience. This is both human and mechanical, like Cher.

>Filter: Various artists - Shitkatapult Empfiehlt (album)

A short compilation. Apparat's I Lost My Shit In Tel Aviv, despite its downbeat lilt, is progressive and addictive enough to deserve mention in the same sentence as Mmm Skyscraper I Love You. Fraction is Prefuse 73 pushed through Squarepusher's mincer, while T. Raumschmiere is way lowdown, perhaps a bit too lowdown for the Fat Roland radar. Fenin & Meteo mix thinly sliced synths with a deeply dubby beat, Magnum 38 sounds like pop music inside a car crash and Soap & Skin plays the piano, and is very, er, pianoey.

>Cut off: Klaus Badelt - He's A Pirate (single)

Don't blame Klaus, he just makes music for films. But a collection of trance remixes of the Pirates Of The Carribean theme tune? Did we learn nothing from the Grease Megamix? And all these clones have been shoe-horned into one single, which is a disturbing tumble back to the bad old days when you would get 22 versions of the same tune on a CD. "Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat." I thought we'd grown out of that in the 80s.