Apollo Four Forty

No need to worry about Apollo 440 turning intelligent in the wake of electronica's growing experimental leanings. Their third album overall, Getting High on Your Own Supply is a ride through sampladelic breakbeat that's just as mad as 1997's Electro Glide in Blue. Seemingly oblivious that even their youngest listeners could spot their samples, Apollo 440 pillage Led Zeppelin and Status Quo (among others), blending styles from trance, ska, hip-hop, dub, and disco with a tossed-off feel that's quite charming. From the breakout single "Stop the Rock" to the unabashed, old-school silliness of "Cold Rock the Mic" and a remix of last year's "Lost in Space" theme which fuses black metal with jungle breakbeats, Getting High on Your Own Supply is another dumb but infectious party album to file alongside Fatboy Slim's You've Come a Long Way, Baby.

Club Mixes 2000 is a remix album from '80s one-album wonder Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Wisely, only two songs out of the 16 here are not from Welcome to the Pleasuredome. Otherwise, this takes the biggest hits from that album and tries to twist them into techno anthems. And, for the most part, the songs translate fairly easily into that genre. Because of the songs' over the top nature and charismatic arrangements, it's possible to pick and choose some outrageous material from the originals and plaster it onto these techno tracks. Those unfamiliar with the material may find this to be rather boring, as many of the songs are featured several times under different remixers. But unlike the Disco albums that the Pet Shop Boys released to a harsh public, these songs are more well-rounded and tend to play out more naturally than those collections. Overall, this is a decent album that does get repetitive, but contains enough good remixes to make it recommendable to fans of the band.

For over a decade now, legendary film composer Ennio Morricone has resisted the dozens of invitations from labels and artists to remix his original work - until now. Somehow the folks at Reprise were either diplomatic enough with a satisfactory aesthetic approach or had a big enough checkbook to satisfy the artist's concerns (and this writer is willing to believe it was the former). A varied cast of pioneers from electronica's vast frontier was assembled by compilation producers Stefan Rambow and Norman Rudnitzky. The first two cuts are the most obvious. There's Apollo 440's "The Man With the Harmonica," mixed out of the soundtrack for Once Upon a Time in the West. There are layers and layers of keyboards extrapolating the melody - and parts of it - with dub effects and large, deep drums and sequencers…

George Frideric (or Frederick) Handel was a German, later British, Baroque composer who spent the bulk of his career in London, becoming well-known for his operas, oratorios, anthems, and organ concertos. Handel received important training in Halle-upon-Saale and worked as a composer in Hamburg and Italy before settling in London in 1712; he became a naturalised British subject in 1727. He was strongly influenced both by the great composers of the Italian Baroque and by the middle-German polyphonic choral tradition.