Collaborating since 2006, life long friends Richie Santana and Peter Bailey are Mind Control, a famous duo producing tech house and electro beats.

Already household names in New York they hold a monthly residency at Pacha NYC and are talked of as one of the top production duos. To show true versatility in their sound they have received much support from a variety of DJs from Victor Calderone and Dubfire to Erick Morillo and Roger Sanchez, with regard to their floor filling DJ sets.

Working on a tag team system when DJing they get the crowds pumped up at Miami's annual Winter Music Conference and clubs in Ibiza.

Mind Control are here with their new album, Addicted. This is a two disc compilation of dark house and tech house beats.

The first CD, entitled Hooked, is full of crisp bass lines, warped rhythms and slinky synths.

'Shakedown' is the opener which sets the tone for the rest of this CD, it's dark with a dirty, gritty vocal sound mixed in with some lighter percussion. Further into this disc, there is a good meaty beat found in 'Served' and I especially like the futuristic sonic sounds played out.

The catchy vocals and club feeling beats to 'Dancer and 'La Palma' bring a somewhat fresher sound although still dark in tone.

'Brain Wash' would appear to have a similar yet subtle background beat as Michael Jackson's 'Thriller'. Listen out and see if you can hear it, This is a dark and classy tune and I like it!

Unfortunately, as with all CDs there were a couple of tracks that just didn't go down too well. 'El Baile Aleman' and 'Ballad' The first reminded me of a scratched record and when it sounded as though a big crescendo was about to peak it fell down flatly. 'Ballad' was very repetitive and the vocals annoying.

CD two is entitled Fixated and much brighter in sound. After the weird intro of 'Esta Loca' the rest of the track brightens the mood of this CD to an exotic tribal dance tune, heavily set with the sounds of tech house. Love it.

'Boost' carries on with the tribal theme whilst 'Shaman' begins to move out of it and into some funky tech house with a good beat and some gritty rhythm. 'Work It' is darker with a dark bass-line and vocals.

'Munich' starts off on a repetitive and boring note but if you can manage to hang on in there for 1 min, 40 secs, the vocals come alive and turn it round to be a good club tune.

Far too minimalist is ' Ring Cadet', it's not a good club sound, it lacks any atmosphere and the same can be said of 'Afrika' which is made up of noise, in fact it rather reminded me of hundreds of bats hanging from trees. And as for 'Hives' well if I wanted to listen to car alarms going off then I could set my own off and stand in the street.

All in all this is a pretty good album, there are some real classic sounding house drops and beats and as for the few beats we are not liking, we can always press the fast forward button!

7

Helena Rea