Welcome to part one of Beatz By The Pound’s year-end roundup for 2007, containing the staff’s favorite dance singles, albums, mixes, producers, and labels of the year.

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For a guy who has done slice-n-dice jungle under the name Soundmurderer, Todd Osborn doesn’t seem to be possessed by much rage on “Outta Sight.” In fact, this single shows he’s more likely to be throwing down some loved-up house vibes than fragmented epics. I’m all for it though - if we’re heading into the last days of summer, then by all means let it be soundtracked by shimmering piano-house.

The individual ingredients on “Outta Sight” aren’t the most innovative - you could dine on the flirting piano melodies, Latin rhythms, over-enthusiastic bassline, and sampled vocal quiver for your next assembly-line meal. But Osborne teases each out, making such potentially hackneyed elements sound current for 2007. Along with Sly Mongoose’s “Snakes and Ladders” and the forthcoming single from Still Going, “Outta Sight” makes a great case that there’s a piano-house revival afoot. On the flip, “L8″ (produced with Tadd Mullinix) provides the necessary jacking foil - 303s, cowbells, and 909s need not apply, as there’s more than enough to go around.

Spectral / SPC-45
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[Nate DeYoung]

Daniel Bell’s fabled 7th City imprint was working the whole minimal techno vibe long before there was even a name for it, and early sides on the label are treasured by that community not just because of their rarity, but for their enduring quality. While reissued tracks from Bell himself (or hell, new music!) would likely be the most welcome to collectors (he didn’t record much for 7th City himself), the two tracks chosen for the first of the three-volume 7th City Classics series are certainly worth additions to anyone’s crate.

Claude Young’s Brother From Another Planet alias contributes the mighty “Acid Wash Conflict,” which, naturally, sounds exactly like the title would lead you to believe, but its Todd Sines’ .Xtrak entry that really should open some ears here. “Multiplexor” is a stomping stealthmode workout in the mold of DBX himself, with a popping riff and acid-style knob-tweaking that moves insistently as much as it jogs in place. If the 7th City sound was before your time, the Classics series are essential. Now, if DBX would get to reissuing those classic Accelarate sides…

7th City / SCD 022
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[Todd Hutlock]

Tadd Mullinix’s James T. Cotton project seems to have found its spiritual home at the Dutch label Crème Organisation, who have not only released his last two singles of raw acid-jacking, but have now gone out of their way to devote a sub-label to this sound called Creme Jak. These first three releases are all one-sided affairs, limited to 200 copies, and don’t contain much more than a liberal helping of 303 and 909.

As with other projects that state a nostalgia for a time that may have never existed, releases like this often need to tame their infatuation with the sound (here, lo-fi acid) in order to be a success. J.T.C’s “Take ‘em Off” falls flat along these lines, as it sounds like any other Chicago acid track circa 1989, but fails to give me anything other than “cool raw acid lines” and “distorted jackin’ drums.” D’Marc Cantu, Mullinix’s partner in 2 AM/FM, is on hand for the second and third releases here, which are a bit better. “No Control” is more percussion-oriented, with a grunged-up vocal echoing the word “house” incessantly, and plenty of flange effects thrown in. “Barely a Track,” under Cantu’s moniker X2, is the pick of the three releases, utilizing a more breakbeat flavored house rhythm to underscore yet even more swampy vocals and low-end drones. An inauspicious start to Creme Jak, yet the potential remains.

Creme Organisation / Creme Jak 01 / 02 / 03
[Listen / Listen / Listen]
[Michael F. Gill]

Originally slated for Diskokaine’s label (home of the wonderful Sally Shapiro), this dark and electro-tinged house track is now being released through Gomma, a doubling of resources and delights that will hopefully lead to Sally Shapiro singing on the next Munk album and Tomboy being reworked by Wolfram Eckert. Given the appearance of none other than Alexander Robotnick alongside Patrick Pulsinger on remix duties for this single, could we be overly hopeful in thinking the neo-Italo cauldron in northern Europe is finally coming to a boil?

“Boing, Boom, Jack!” is exactly what it promises, I’ll tell you that much—heavy pulsating, dancefloor-shredding nouveau electro with monster old-school acid house drums and squelches, the kind of thing those black boot-donning kiddies in Copenhagen should be stomping along to right about now. The original is right insane, but the remixes shouldn’t be overlooked—Pulsinger goes deep for a reception in hard electro territory and penetrates the end zone with a vibe perfect for the Italo Superbowl Shuffle. Robotnick, old hat that he is, kicks the drums and spaceship noises into overdrive and pulls the extra point, in just a little over five minutes. God, sometimes it feels good to root for the home team, don’t it?

Gomma / Gomma 088
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[Mallory O’Donnell]

Sometimes you wonder why he releases his weaker material, but when he’s on it, Jamal Moss is the heir apparent to the jack masters of old. These four amazing, jammed, slammed, jacking machine workouts with Noleian Reusse are doing acid in your ear. This is “proper” techno, made the old-school way, for the pure pleasure of the resonance and the wildness of the frequencies, as “lo-fi” as they may objectively sound. This is the hot, wet response to sleeparchive’s cold, dry machine drum beats, or the dark cousin of Tadd Mullinix’ wilder journeys into the freq as JTC or TNT. The goodness begins with “Faso”, which tumbles through a sea of snares and a filtered, low pH melody until it finds the floor with a flood of toms, and then brings the boom. “Djbouti” starts with everything delayed to buggery, conjuring the groove up from a series of beats which come thuddering back in the loop one on top of the other. “Yaounde” rolls with a massive, flanged out melodies and a tweaked up, seasick groove that nearly looses its lunch somewhere in the effects chain. Are drum machines animal? These ones are.

Crème Organization / Crème 12-28
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[Peter Chambers]

Tadd Mullinix has revealed himself to be one of the most remarkable and idiosyncratic producers this side of Ann Arbor, effortlessly alternating between dense, smoky hip-hop grounded beatz under his Dabrye alias and acidic jack tracks, either cleaner (as James T. Cotton) or filthier than an aging rock-star’s hard drive (as TNT, with Osborne, or here, as JTC). This is some of the most seriously monged, script-flipping munt music out there folks. Watch your pets run yelping from the room as you put it on. Hell, play it at a party and watch everyone except the dude on mushrooms completely lose their shiznit. To me, “The Sound of Winedrinking” is more like the sound of a dreaming drum machine with all the freakquencies of its unconscious thoughts streaming freely across its dozy circuits. “Psychedelic Mindtrip”? Well, mind the title, then dig right in. This side gradually piles on the hits and effects until the whole swirling mélange finally goes off like a howl from a bent head. Freaky stuff, indeed.

Crème Organization / Crème 12-29
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[Peter Chambers]

I:Cube is a bankable producer, and “Acid Tablet” is no exception. While not tearing up any trees for innovation, if you like Europeans aping early American house/techno then you can’t get much better than this. “Acid Tablet” is a rather standard 303 workout with some typical I:Cube strings welling up in the background. “Danse De Saint Guy” is the kind of mournful soundscape that I:Cube has been doing for years, with huge synth washes and lots of cowbell, plus garbled vocal samples and what sounds like Gregorian monks chanting. “Un Proton Pour Moi, Un Neutron Pour Toi” is a nice piece of electro-disco in a Maurice Fulton style that caps off this quality EP.

Versatile / VER048
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[Ronan Fitzgerald]

Not very long after his last appearance in Beatz, Michel Morin returns under the Sneak Thief alias for another outstanding release. And quite a different one at that-the Turkish Delight exotica of The Hollow Land EP gives way to the heady, heavy-buckled black-boot affair that is “Body Militia.” Drawing more explicitly on EBM and acid touches and a deftly-woven, very slight female vocal, it’s a fist-thumping trip that still displays a certain refinement in its balance of disparate elements. Electro single of the year? If not, it’s mighty damn close. The “Maru & Comix 8 MM Remix” is a bit stripped-down for my liking, but it channels the gothic force and bounceosity of the original into more modernistic, minimal trappings, so house/techno DJ’s are likely to find it on the more useful/functional side.

Voltage Musique / VMR 010
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[Mallory O’Donnell]

Originally released in 1998 as half of a limited-edition double-pack and now available on its own, these five cuts represent the first recorded work by Jamal Moss under his Hieroglyphic Being moniker. As the title might suggest, these are stripped-down 303 monsters that, thanks to their timeless sound, don’t sound dated in the least—or perhaps that should be impossible to accurately date, as they sound like they could have been made anytime after the initial acid boom in early-80s Chicago. With acid suddenly coming into vogue again of late, the reissue couldn’t be more timely, and these tracks will mix well with anything from DJ Pierre to Adonis to 2 AM/FM. The three tracks on the A side are a bit formulaic: lay down a sick bassline, add beats, tweak knobs, repeat. But on the flip, we’re treated to the longer and far stronger “Rational Expression,” wherein Moss gives things a bit more time to develop by upping the length and spacing out the grooves a bit more. The palette is verrrrrry familiar by that point, but Moss hits some new octaves and percussion sounds in there, and even messes with the volume a bit. But then again, if you’re into acid sounds, repetition is never a bad thing. Final track “Ellipse” is the most experimental and most frenetic, but also the shortest. There were far, far better things to come from Moss later, but those looking for some fun and funky acid tracks could do far worse.

Mathematics Recordings / Mathematics 002
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[Todd Hutlock]