Prosumer: Panorama Bar 03

The series celebrating Panorama Bar, the upstairs room at the world famous Berlin nightclub Berghain, certainly has no strong desire to be an archive of techno in its every movement. With the first disc by Cassy coming out in 2006, followed by a Tama Sumo mix in 2009, and finally the Prosumer mix of 2011, Ostgut Ton’s in no hurry to proselytize the latest word of the Gods of techno through these comps, particularly since they usually contain more than a fair share of advance releases and non-hits. Prosumer’s is a mix of great quality that sometimes rushes into specialized effects, like the grime intrusion of Lil Silva’s “Pulse Vs Flex” right after the sugar-sweet sample rush of Creation’s mix of Circulation’s “Sincerely”. At other times, the flow gets dulled by the jaunty (Theo Parrish’s “Twin Cities) or clumsy (the mix of the old school Fingers Inc.’s “Music Takes Me Up” into Oracy’s 2010 “Bass Mood” with its stubbornly stiff syncopated snare), but each track is treated as a star, standing on its own turf while communing with the surrounding ground. There’s no functional suture nor any anthemic heights to be found. Prosumer drags out the essence of tracks, rather than extracting whatever he needs to keep momentum, which itself is admirable enough to forgive a few questionable decisions. Also helping matters is just how fun his mix is to listen to.