Baby Anne

Baby Anne's emergence from underneath the wing of funky breaks assembler DJ Icey has not tamed her knack for spinning persistent, pounding, hard, and heavy bass. On her fourth CD, Mixed Live, the latest in the Moonshine series, she lives up to her billing as the "Bass Queen," a self-proclaimed moniker she originally assumed on Bass Queen In the Mix,her first album for Miami bass label Pandisc.

The set, recorded at Las Vegas's Club RA, is introduced with the crowd's cheers, a staple of live rock releases that gives her set a spontaneous, real-time quality usually not found on DJ mix CDs. Then the volume slowly ascends as she uses feedback to fill the club with grated reverb. Suddenly the mix cuts to the first track, "This is the Sound of the Underground," a claim by Cyberian Knights' Jackal that takes the speed-metal approach to electro bass with an angry vocoder chorus to match. That should kill any expectations you might have for light, high-NRG club crap.

The set's gem tracks are Baby Anne's own "Down to Zero," a trip-hop acid take on the Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams"; and Scratch D vs. H-Bomb's "Nightmare 2002," a song that captures the ghetto spirit of Florida raves in the late Nineties, when b-boys and dope dealers were as much a part of the scene as lollipop-sucking PLUR people. This playlist is meant to rock the discotheque, although there is the occasional, uplifting melody like Icey's breakbeat redux of Ferry Corsten's super dance track "Punk," which was probably intended for pill-poppers anyway.