I've always been a big fan of Sasha's work. As a remixer and DJ he's an absolute genius. Given his talent for manipulating the work of others, I was really looking forward to seeing what he did with some original material.

On the first Northern Exposure comp with John Digweed, he took a wide variety of source material and turned it into a hypnotic, seamless whole, climaxing with the brilliant Rabbit in the Moon take on Tori Amos' "Precious Things." Samples were cut and edited deftly across tracks, and it was obvious that Sasha was truly a singular phenomenon. The ketamine-blasted rush that was his Global Underground set in Ibiza just proved it even more–this was the DJ as artist, the record as the pallette, the manipulation itself as the form.

If that's the case, then I suppose that this record is the DJ as a trainspotting hack. I have listened to this thing countless (okay, about twelve) times over the last couple of weeks, really trying to like it, trying to find something beneath the overwhelming mediocrity, but there just isn't much there, I'm afraid.

I mean, this is Sasha, right? We know he's got the talent, and it's not like he's got to hold down a day job. He has the time and money to come up with something truly original and fascinating, but instead, the long-awaited Airdrawndagger rewards our patience with the Windham-Hill noodlings of something called "Mr. Tiddles?!?"

This crap doesn't fly. Not when the seminal garage band has been replaced by that 13-year-old down the street with the newest version of Cubase, and anyone with a few hundred dollars' worth of equipment and the slightest smidgeon of talent can thrash out material better than this in an afternoon. When you're somebody of Sasha's stature, and you make a point out of hyping an album of original material, it had better be damn-near life changing. This record does nothing that hasn't been done a thousand times before, and it's disenheartening as hell.

Basically, I'll save you, gentle reader the sixteen bucks and the heartache now. Spend it instead on some local artist in your town who actually takes chances. Trust me, you've heard every song, every tired chord progression (actually there are only two distinct ones on this record), every sound there is here before, and probably several years ago.

Electronic music is a double-edged sword in that something that was unique and surprising yesterday will seem dated and quaint in a matter of weeks or months. This kind of cultural attention-deficit-disorder has the beneficial side effect of keeping artists on their toes. They have to keep pushing to stay relevant. Some, like Autechre and the Aphex Twin, stay ahead of the curve by constantly drawing and redrawing their own lines. Others, like Mouse on Mars or Plaid, just live blissfully outside the box to begin with. But kids, if you've got the cajones to do trance in 2002, you'd better have something different to offer.

Apparently, Sasha hasn't been paying attention to any of this, and assumes it's still, oh, 1997 or so. Not that it matters much, because even after you get through the dated sound and lazy programming, there just isn't much substance there. It's almost like he set out to make a record that would appeal to the widest possible audience, perhaps a polite trance record for the Starbuck's crowd. There's variety here, sure, but nothing ever strays far from the mark, which is noncommital trance, broken down into sanitized four to seven-minute chunks.

The engineering and sound quality are good, but that's to be expected, since the whole record is digital from the ground up. In fact, it's glaringly so. Everything is washed over with effects, and the drums are panned all over the place. Every trace of human involvement has been drained away. Some artists can get away with this, but apparently Sasha can't.

There simply isn't much here in the way of content, but just so you don't think I'm being needlessly cantankerous, here's a quick track-description (which also doubles as a grudge list):

"Drempels:" a new-age intro in Lydian mode with soft synth pads.

"Mr. Tiddles:" wet leads over echoed percussion and a repetitive bassline. This track takes about five minutes to go absolutely nowhere and ends exactly as it began.

"Magnetic North:" Euro club music 101. Basically the same thing Underworld was doing better back in 1996. A descending minor-key bassline and chord progression float along while echoed guitars fade in and out. The drum programming seems almost an afterthought, a problem which plagues the whole record. At about 3:50, the exact strings and bass from Xpander are thrown into the mix. The track sounds good, but there's nothing to engage the listener, and once it's over, it's completely forgotten.

"Cloud Cuckoo:" sounds like a New Order homage. The drums are very dated (this track has handclaps. bad ones.), and the synth bleeps and tinny strings make this sound like the theme music for a video game. There's a neat gated bass sound underneath, but it takes a great deal more than that to redeem something this tepid.

"Immortal:" a lame attempt to make a fierce-and-menacing track. Again, we've got a neat bassline, but it's completely blotted out by the strings, which sound like something off a Wendy Carlos record.

"Fundamental:" just takes too long to get started. The drums are simplistic, and like all the other tracks, once you've heard eight measures of them, you've heard them all. Vague attempts are made to sound "Eastern," I suppose, but it takes more than a few noodling flutes to do that. At the six-minute mark, the percussion drops out to make room for an awesome sequence using what sounds like reversed gamelan bells. Then the exact same drum pattern as before comes in and ruins the momentum. I really wanted to enjoy this one, too.

"Boileroom:" opens with a neat backmasked riff that's great for a few seconds, but Sasha's so proud of this little bit of engineering that he's going to drag it out for over two minutes. Then the drums come in, still not doing anything more than acting as a placeholder. Oh, yeah, and the strings from Xpander again…

"Bloodrock:" starts out as a nice, brooding bit of trance, but never takes off. Echoed piano arpeggios act as the only real melodic material, and they're repetitive to the point of being infuriating.

"Requiem:" don't even get me started on the title. Just don't. Basically, a reverb-drenched uber-pretty synth chorale. Meh. M-e-h. Meh.

"Golden Arm:" The same tempo, the same key, the same drums, the same chord progression as "Magnetic North." Slightly different samples, though. No real redeeming qualities.

"Wavy Gravy:" I presume this is supposed to be some sort of climax to the record. It suffers all the aforementioned faults, and it takes forever to get going, which would be understandible if all this was leading the listener somewhere, but there's no payoff, no epiphany, nil. Like everything else here, it's utterly forgettable.

I've really tried with this record, and if it was any other artist, I wouldn't have even bothered with this whole screed. But this is Sasha, and he's capable of far better than this. It's ironic that, while listening to this, I was envisioning ways that each of the tracks could be remixed and made into something more corporeal. Perhaps that's what this record is-a tabula rasa for other DJs to cut and splice into something else. Or maybe it's some kind of lame post-modern statement. Or maybe it's just a crappy trance record from a DJ who should just stick to his day job.