Thomas Hammann and Gerd Janson, the men responsible for mixing the fourth compilation from the very successful 'Live at Robert Johnson' series, definitely aren’t such popular DJs as, for example, the author of the previous part, Ivan Smagghe. Besides holding a residency in the title club, one is working in a record shop, while the other is managing the Running Back label as well as working as a music journalist. All these activities have evidently reflected on the content of their mix. It takes only a peek on the tracklist to realise that it was created by people with passion who, instead of treating us with worn, and often lacking in quality, new tracks, prefer to dig a little deeper in their record library and dust off lesser known, or long forgotten, goodies, since over half of the records on 'Live at Robert Johnson Vol. 4' come from the mid 1990s.
The mix starts with the excellent ‘Liferaft’ released in 1993 via Richie Hawtin, John Acquaviva and Karl Kowalski of Definitive Recordings, whose idea was to present their view on house music. Now, after 17 years, we can fully understand what was on their minds, because the tune still sounds great and it is a rock-hard proof that deep house wasn’t invented last year. As I said before, Hammann and Janson dredged out many such bearded tracks. Among others, we have a remix of ‘Jazz Carnival’ from Azymuth by Global Communication (Tom Middleton and Mark Pritchard), two parts of ‘Take It Away’ by Chez Damier from the catalogue of the legendary Kevin Saunderson’s label KMS and ‘Can You Feel It’ by DJ Duke. The most modern track in this whole entourage is Radio Slave’s ‘Tantakatan’.
The entire album gives us an approximate image of the atmosphere at the cyclical Liquid nights, organised by its authors. Smooth, organic and unpolluted by plastic sounds, it blends with elements of disco and classic tracks which, despite the passage of time, haven’t lost their value and sit in perfect symbiosis with newer productions. Everything is mixed together in a traditional way. Thomas and Gerd are not afraid to play almost whole tracks, and it works out perfectly in the case of this set. It’s merely too bad that it’s the last part of 'Live at Robert Johnson'.
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