Juno Reactor ODYSSEY 1992-2002 BY MICHAEL FREEDBERG

Ten years of Juno Reactor’s music demonstrates remarkably little stylistic change and scarcely more scope. Their narrow-casted view of the world — electronic and cool, mostly instrumental with an occasional voice chant, spacy melodies and high-speed beats — edits out almost all of the available universe, or else hears it through a narrow filter. Yet it works, primarily because the band draw upon a vast storehouse of outside sources. Snippets of space music ("High Energy Protons," "Feel the Universe") drift into the mix; Kraftwerk ("Laughing Gas") and African-influenced disco ("Kyle Lam") make an unexpected and slightly awkward appearance. Arabic music ("God Is God"), the Gipsy Kings ("Pistolero"), tribal house music ("Conga Fury"), Italian techno ("Rotorblade"), and ZZ Top, no less ("Hotaka"), get quoted, adapted, or, more aptly, disintegrated into a mix whose soft edges, spongy middle, hallucinatory sound effects, and whispery bottoms epitomize but never challenge one’s expectations of the club genre known as trance.