It's been a while since we've let you all peer deep inside our CD player here at AIM. Here are a couple of the gems we picked up on the last shopping trip.

The newest release by Martyn Bennett, Bothy Music, on RykoDisc is a no less than brilliant fusion of traditional Celtic music with the contemporrary sounds of hip-hop and house. What may seem like a rather puzzling combination on first listen unfolds to be a very natural hybrid of vast musical styles and sounds.Martyn's intense familiarity of traditional classic and folk, the urban culture of the street and house music scene, and mastery of a wide variety of instruments which leads to his ability to compose, perform, produce and mix all tracks of this CD himself. His ability to meticulously string together a variety of classic styles is no doubt a by product of his education at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow, where he began formal classical training for violin and piano. What makes this release shine is the preservation of traditonal styles while injecting "new" sounds. While other artists have attempted this same method in the past, the unique sounds of each genre have sat separate in the mix whereas Martyn's compositions invite the traditional to dance freely with the contemporary as a natural extension of one another. You can learn more about Martyn Bennett at http://www.rykodisc.com.

There really isnt too much reason to go into gory detail in a review of Vapourspace. With a giant whoosh of ambience akin to the Orb injected with a tad more late 90's noise the first track introduces us to the first full length release by DJ Mark Gage aka Vapourspace. Its no wonder why such electronicas greats as Aphex Twin and the Orbital have had Vapourspace grace their stage - they just plain kick ass! After stumbling across past Vapourspace tracks on random compilations I feel I am safe in saying that this is some of the best work to date. Each track flows seamlessly into the next while managing to maintain separate identities. An extremely broad range is explored on this CD with presentations of ambient, trance, and house throughout. Gotta admit that many times the groove made me wish I wasnt sitting here in front of the computer and could have been out in a club hearing this over a big booming sound system, lost in the beat. Supposedly Vapourspace lives in cyberspace at http://www.vapourspace.com but we have yet to connect succesfully.

you may contact the reviewer via email: aherrick@auricular.com