Editorial Reviews

Like the three installments in the series before it, Om Miami '09 is a blend of recent material from the Om Records catalog and a handful or two of previously unreleased tracks. This volume was released to coincide with the label's 15th-anniversary party held in conjunction with the annual Winter Music Conference in Miami, and offers a distinctly beachy vibe. Although everything here falls fairly comfortably into the broad category of house music, there are plenty of interesting subtleties at work that keep most of the tracks from sliding into the generic thump-thump tedium that so often afflicts the genre. All of the musicians and DJs -- and this is an all-star cast that includes Mark Farina, King Kooba, Rithma, and Fred Everything, among other luminaries -- keep the beat bright and bouncy, often with a subtle but noticeable swing. Sebo K's "Diva" incorporates some nice dubwise touches, King Kooba makes ingeniously rhythmic use of chopped-up vocal samples on "Slightly Burnt," and just when the groove is starting to get just a little bit monolithic and monotonous, DJ Simi steps in with "Undernaples" and dislocates the beat just enough to grab your attention again. Toward the end of the program, performance art legend Laurie Anderson makes an appearance, funkily mashed up in a brilliant remix of "O Superman" by M.A.N.D.Y. and Booka Shade. And Rithma's "Tell Me Why" comes perilously close to being an actual song, and a really quite good one at that. No label does this kind of thing as well as Om does. Rick Anderson, All Music Guide

Customer Reviews

• Listener Rating: