In addition to being a well-respected underground producer, label owner, and one half of rap group Jigmastas, Brooklyn DJ Spinna is one of the few DJs as adept at spinning house music as hip-hop. Appropriately, his mix CD Raiding the Crates lacks the jump cuts and extraneous scratches that mark his prior hip-hop compilations (The Beat Suite, Wonder Wrote It). A pure soul confection, it glides from track to track, highlighting several key ones from Guidance Records, a Chicago label renowned for its high-quality dance releases, and features producers such as Paul Hunter ("Reflection"), San Francisco's Dubtribe Sound System ("El Regalo de Amor"), and Kevin Yost ("Swinging"). Spinna programs the tracks together with various techniques to create a briskly paced hour full of twists and surprises.

Raiding the Crates also illustrates house music's continuing relevance and artistic diversity. At one point Spinna plays F 'n' L's "Besos de Los Angeles," a track undergirded by Brazilian rhythms and filtered disco samples; Uptight Productions' "Righteous Dub," a sluggish reggae tune marked by eerie, echoing vocals; and Projekt: PM's "Don't You Forget," a deep house instrumental defined by rumbling bass drums and keyboard melodies. Taking two-and-a-half minutes from each track, Spinna harmoniously blends them all together, subtly changing the tempo without disrupting the set.

The Guidance tracks ensure Raiding the Crates is a cut above most house mix CDs. But there's a subtle science at work in its creation, from the smart sequencing of its contents to the bizarre samples Spinna injects, tweaks out, and lays over a handful of records, such as DJ Deep's "Signature." On Raiding the Crates, Spinna isn't picking apart the Guidance catalog to churn out a cheap compilation for a quick buck; he's using it to paint a satisfying aural portrait. (Mosi Reeves)

Sunn 0)))
Flight of the Behemoth (Southern Lord)

A photo inside this CD's artwork shows the label of a bottle of the antianxiety drug Klonopin – with the "may cause drowsiness" warning in big letters – with Ozzy Osbourne's name and address on it. That's such a perfect touch for this album, and for this band. Sunn 0)))'s two members, Greg Anderson and Stephen O'Malley, have over the years exhibited – through their respective efforts in Thorr's Hammer, Burning Witch, Goatsnake, and Khanate – a single-minded commitment to the cause of sedative-fueled, post-Black Sabbath sludge/drone music, and they would probably frighten Ozzy himself if he ever heard what they were doing.

Sunn 0))) is, to me, the purest example of Anderson and O'Malley's over-the-top obsession with feedback and subwoofer-abusing frequencies. Their mission, their Web site says, is "to create trance like soundscapes with the ultimate low end/bottom frequencies intended to massage the listeners intenstines into a act of defecation [sic all]." I don't have the speakers, or the cleaning supplies, to really test whether they've succeeded in this mission. Still, I've found their first two CDs to be excellent examples of hypnotic "power ambient drone" (their term) even if they are based almost entirely on the work of defunct Sub Pop bong-mavens Earth. (Sunn 0))) was conceived as an Earth tribute act.)

Flight of the Behemoth, though, builds on the Earth-style foundation of Sunn 0)))'s other albums to create a full-on doom symphony. The duo's familiar oozing guitar-bass throb is on hand for the album's first half, but things really get good on the two long tracks produced by Japanese noise king Masami Akita (a.k.a. Merzbow, he of the 50-disc Merzbox released not long ago). He stops short of his notorious wall of noise, instead using some judicious distortion effects (and a bit of distant piano bashing) to transform Sunn 0)))'s ominous, snail-paced hum into something violent and otherworldly. It's stunning. (Will York)

Peggy Honeywell
Honey for Dinner (Galaxia)

A country girl is singing her heart out. Or that's how it sounds, though she apparently lives in Chicago, and her vocals are often slight, often a laid-back drawl, occasionally verging on frail. There are banjos and slide guitars all over Peggy Honeywell's Honey for Dinner, and the picture inside shows her standing in a sepia-toned yard in a granny dress, looking like a mountain girl from another century. Songs sound like secret desires and spilled confessions; some of them are over by the time you're getting into the swing of things, like scribbled-out lyrics that might as well be recorded but might not be finished. "Sympathy Date," the first track, crams extra pleading words into a lyric that sets her up as lovelorn but sounds like an offer it would be a shame to refuse.

Not all of the songs are full of doubts – "Darlin Man" is a seduction piece, a late-night serenade that turns an object of desire into a tasty piece of fruit. But on one song she ruefully observes, "Oh, the games you are playing," knowing there's nothing she can do, and another is a melancholy reminder of all the problems that don't get solved by love alone. "I don't want to live on the moon," she confesses. "Sorry that I can't go with you. Even though you want me to, I don't want to live on the moon."