DJ Duke presents Return to the Pleasure Dome

DJ Duke! Is there a human being older than 35 that doesn’t have a copy of his Moonshine mix CD in their closet? It’s like the Appetite for Destruction of the House Music scene – everyone I know has a copy lurking somewhere in the bottom of a CD stack, its ubiquity something out of the world of legend. (Amazingly, the tracklist is far from dated, which you can’t say about many of these things. It leads with Phuture’s “Mental Breakdown” and including multiple classics from X Press 2 and Felix Da House Cat.)

Minneapolis Exchange apparently convinced DJ Duke to take his Pleasure Dome alias out of the attic, brush off the cobwebs and blow up your stereo one more time. Mission accomplished: Return To The Pleasure Dome is incendiary, and at a time when just about everyone is looking back to the past with questions offers a progressive rather than regressive answer.

“Wild Dreams” is the kind of digital explosive device that never goes out of style – an eruption of FX layered over a simple but wildly effective melody. The Pleasure Dome titling convention is alive and well with “7 Minutes of Wild Techfunk” standing up straight beside his old releases, “8 Min of Techfunk,” “12 Min. of Dreams” and the Pleasure Done album 84 Min of Tech Funk. If this is a new track, I’m beside myself: few people can emulate this style so well and it makes you remember why DJ Duke was so intensely regarded back in the day. The Adesse Versions remix makes well with its remix of “Wild Dreams,” while the Jack Complex rework hurls thunderbolts from high places. Huge!