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This two-disc set is the third release for Solveig — one of Paris house music’s most important DJs — and the second in just the past year. He works closely with Paris DJ Bob Sinclar, and both have an eclectic approach to selecting tracks for a house-music mix. Eclecticism is everything here; Solveig’s beat is beboppish, edgy, and deep like that of Chicago house-music renovator Derrick Carter. But whereas Carter prefers to carry a soulful, bluesy sound on his beat, the first disc of this set goes almost everywhere, in typical Paris house-music style, from tribal (“Put Your Drink Down,” by Mr. V) to gospel (Copyright’s “We Can Rise”) and on to old-school rap (MC Mellowdee’s “And You Don’t Stop”) and moody cityscapes (DJ Gregory’s “Traffic”), adding three of his own tracks, “Jealousy,” “I’m a Good Man,” and “Something Better.” Going everywhere on one boppy beat recalls the classic disco era, in which travel to all sorts of exotic places was a seductive fantasy. Thirty years later, Solveig cannot recover the fantastical, but he does conjure the freewheeling, non-stop excitement that was disco at its best. The second disc goes to even greater stylistic extremes, as Solveig attaches his beat to all manner of pre-disco, post-disco, disco, and non-disco songs. The Chi-Lites’ “Are You My Woman,” George Clinton’s “Atomic Dog,” Kurtis Blow’s “The Breaks,” and the Jackson Sisters’ “I Believe in Miracles” all do their thing here along with tasty obscurities (such as Francine McGee’s “Delirium,” Bugz in the Attic’s “Booty La La,” the Rebirth’s “Evil Vibrations”) on what amounts to a dance-floor adventure.
