I'm Comin' Up: Buildups, Breakdowns and Glissandi (or, How to Rave without Even Trying)
1. Dusty Kid, "Kore" (12-inch, Boxer)
2. Tiger Stripes, "Mad at Me" (12-inch, Get Physical)
3. Danton Eeprom, "Confessions of an English Opium Eater" (12-inch, Infiné)
4. Damian Schwartz, "RyF IV" (12-inch, Apnea)
5. Ruede Hagelstein, "Der Kammblasser" (12-inch, Lebensfreude)
6. Perc & Fractal, "Up" (12-inch, Kompakt Extra)
7. Matt O'Brien, "Serotone (Radio Slave's Panorama Garage Remix)" (12-inch, Rekids)
8. Black Strobe, "I'm a Man (Audion's Donation Mix)" (12-inch, Playloud)

Techno takes a lot of flak for tropes that many listeners deem clichés: chief among them, the genre's insistence upon emphatic buildups and breakdowns. Make no mistake, those things can indeed be depressingly programmatic—think of the stock snare roll used to animate lackluster "progressive house" tunes, cuing the dutiful hands-in-air response from all and sundry. (Drugs, of course, play no small part in this equation.) But when used right, these rushing, buzzing waves of intensity can feel like a perfect marriage of form and function, which might be another way of saying form and fun.

Dancing doesn't have to be "fun," of course; it's arguable that "blog house" or "new club" or whatever it's supposed to be called has swung too far towards an insistence upon thrills that wear their thrillingness on their sleeve. But given techno's immersive qualities—head down, locked into a groove, lost in time—the buildups and breakdowns lend an essential sense of dynamism to the music's streamlined form. They're the eddies against which the river's flow can be measured, the white-knuckled passages that turn a DJ set from a smooth ride down the Autobahn into a hair-raising roller-coaster ride. Especially as techno has tilted towards the lackadaisical, these moments have become even more important—adrenaline shots to jolt the ketaminimal body back to life.

Another possibility is that I'm just a cheeseball. Even when they're schlocky as hell—especially when they're schlocky as hell—I can't get enough of these Cape Canaveral caterwauls, these screamingly obvious moments of launchpad lunacy. In 2006, Radio Slave's remix of Chelonis R. Jones' "Deer in the Headlights" was my go-to jam for cheap thrills; in 2007, that track seems to have launched a cottage industry, to which this compilation is dedicated. Radio Slave's contribution to this mix is actually far more restrained: avoiding obvious moments of rupture, he slots into the groove and rides it for eight-and-a-half minutes. A wild pitch-style string ostinato soars high above, like a flying carpet offering out-of-body joyrides; what the tune shares with the rest of the selections here is its glissando attack, hoovering up notes like a hummingbird gulping down nectar. Again, drugs play no small part in the equation: Ecstasy accentuates music's mercurial properties. Emphasizing that silvery ripple by foregrounding wailing sirens and nervous oscillations, these tracks all reflect the jaw-clenched hedonism of club culture circa 2007. Fortunately, at least to my ears, they sound thrilling on their own. The agent that really makes them come alive is community: catch any of these while standing in a frenzied crowd and just try to stay stone-faced.

A note on the format: in their natural habitat, as it were, these tracks would be mixed seamlessly, but I've simply strung them together sequentially, to better abide by the 80-minute CD-R format of the project. And ideally, a DJ probably wouldn't mix all eight together without taking a breather in between. Well, I might, but I've always been fond of peak-time overload. Prepare to flash . . . .

Philip Sherburne is a columnist for eMusic, The Wire, Pitchfork, and others. He lives in Barcelona, Spain.