VA: Do You Copy?
Mitek

Mitek makes its bid for the heavyweight compilation ranks with the five-year anniversary collection Do You Copy?, a two-disc, 150-minute round-up of tracks by roster artists and guests like [a]pendics.shuffle and Midaircondo. Most contributors rework material from the Swedish label's catalogue, though the liner notes don't help much in that regard when info about the songs' original creators isn't included. The set's filled with funky tech-house clubbers offset by a smattering of minimal soundscapes and glitchy vocal cuts.

Midaircondo's opening cover of Sophie Rimheden's “Talkuin2it” is as fine as listeners familiar with the trio's Type outing Shopping For Images would anticipate. Elsewhere on the vocal front, Rimheden herself adds the testifyin' glitch-banger “The Real Way,” Smyglyssna's “You Think 2 Much” layers MC Bas-1's flow over hip-hop lurch, and Jay Haze merges falsetto vocals with Rhodes soul on the spicy “Feelings Are Hard.” Minimal tracks include Son of Clay's alchemical handling of Mikael Stavöstrand's “Lite,” which transforms the piece into a rippling ‘scape of field noises, voices, creaks, and whirrs, Jeff Milligan's cheery Son of Clay rework (“The Problem with Strakova”), and Johan Fotmeijer's sweet “Flowers” where glistening strums breezily flow over a minimal bump.

But the greater share of the collection's devoted to clubbier material, ranging from Ozy's sleek groover (“Buxurnar eru magnari”) to Pellarin's surging glitch-dub (“Love Without Effort”). Mikkel Metal contributes a faded dub-funk break graced by a twanging electric guitar lead (“Famil”) while Johan Skugge, Jens Lodén, Fenin, and Håkan Lidbo add pumping cuts. Much of the release's contents could just as easily have appeared on Orac, with tracks by Folie (“Form Meets Dysfunction”), Theodor Zox (“Zepto Swing Lite”), and Anders Ilar (“Between the Digits”) working up a bleepy stutter-house sweat that resembles the Seattle-based label's sound (Orac alumnus [a]pendics.shuffle offers an instructional seminar of his own on the sputtery pumper “Belive [sic] Me You”). Skugg and Stavöstrand's “Rotated Twist” and Bulgur Brothers's (a Skugge-Stavöstrand-Tilliander collab) “Snowy & Frosty” suggest that Mitek artists have been soaking up Portable's glitchy Afro-house too. Mitek's wise focus on club material prevents the collection from dragging, despite the collection's humungous length.

April 2006