The Art Of The 12 Inch [Collector's Edition, Extra tracks]

By rights, every ZTT 12-inch single should have had a compulsory bonus track with the sound of cash registers ringing, because Messrs Horn, Morley et al. certainly knew how to milk the fan for every penny. Not content to release merely a 7" edit of each song and a long version on 12" vinyl, ZTT cluttered record shops with multiple mixes of their current fave raves. "Got the latest Frankie 12-inch single?.... oh, but that mix is SO last Thursday...". In their favour, however, the 12" mixes from ZTT were at least designed for the punters to listen to as well as dance to, and so avoided most of the remix sins of the period - hey! drum machine solo! Nice.

This ambitious collection of extended artefacts tries its best to gather up some of those remixes and tinkered-with versions of songs that don't crop up on "12-inch/80s" and similar compilations. Some of these haven't been released on CD before and most were hard to find- until now.

There are some obvious gems here: the surreal "Young Person's Guide to the 12-inch" version of Frankie's 'Rage Hard' features a soothing female voice saying things like "Now... the funky guitar" in a detached manner, while slices of the song arrive and depart underneath. There is yet another mix of 'Dr Mabuse' which, no matter how many different ways you hear it, is still an astonishing recording. Propaganda's Claudia Brucken and Glenn Gregory wallow in the gorgeous 12-inch (6 minutes plus) version of "When Your Heart Runs Out of Time" and I was very pleased that the compilers left the little snatch of dialogue from the film 'Insignificance' that preceded the song so perfectly on the original 12" vinyl. The 'beaten' version of the classic "Moments in Love" by Art of Noise is a sumptuous soundscape and benefits from Anne Dudley's superb string (or, knowing ZTT, faux-strings) arrangement.

Elsewhere, ZTT acts that never really troubled the charts (Nasty Rox Inc, Anne Pigalle, Andrew Poppy, Instinct) turn in songs that range from perfectly respectable to excellent. Instinct's legendary lost single "Sleepwalking" sounds like it's built on a left-over Frankie riff, but works amazingly well with the hypnotic female vocal. Andrew Poppy teased us on the "IQ6 ZTT Sampled" compilation in the 80s and here delivers yet another excellent Philip-Glass-meets-Robert-Fripp piece of minimalism.

And, of course, ZTT wasn't just about mid-80s bombast and sampled slap bass... they also released some of the coolest early acid house tracks, evidenced here by Pacific 909 and Cubik, both by 808 State.

Just occasionally the quality drops from 'white hot' to just 'good' (Art and Act weren't quite as wonderful as I expected) and the weird Hibakush-ah mix of 'Two Tribes' seems to have kept just the annoying bits of the song and ditched the cool ones. But with over two and a half hours of ZTT excess on offer here, it's a trivial moan.

Ian Peel has done another excellent job of mastering and 'curating' the compilation and provides some Morley-esque liner notes in the booklet. He's clearly a fan and it's good to have this material compiled by someone who cares, rather than a man in a suit trying to sting us for a bit more cash. The sound quality is excellent - neither 'flat' nor 'too good to be true'.

This is a generally very good compilation, which includes some of the slightly rarer mixes of well-known ZTT artists and throws in some extensions of also-rans such as Instinct, Lomax and Nasty Rox Inc. for good measure (no Seal, though). The mastering is solid without being overblown, although disc two is far louder than disc one. 'The obscenity', an interlude parodying DJ Mike Read, sounds distorted.

The less impressive aspects are ... compiler Ian Peel's rather overcooked sleevenotes (yes, we know you're obsessed with ZTT and that you put a lot of thought into the Element re-releases; we don't need it shoved down our throats to quite this extent), and the inclusion of two mixes widely available elsewhere. The first is Propaganda's 'Jewelled' (here retitled 'Duel (jewelled)'), which is part of their superb remix album 'Wishful thinking', and should stay there - there have been similar complaints after Peel pointlessly yanked 'Thought' from the same album, for the deluxe edition of 'A secret wish'. The other ubiquity is the '(beaten)' version of The Art Of Noise's 'Moments in love'. Again, this is easy to get, on the 'Daft' compilation, where it is labelled simply 'Love'.

Peel also includes Art & Act, the shelved Horn/Morley collaboration. 'Life's a barrel of laughs' is a more complete version of 'This is your life', included on the recent AoN compilation 'Influence', and is better than those versions, which isn't saying much. Here Morley's voice is an almost listenable whisper.

FGTH's 'Two tribes (Hibakush-ah!)' is not the rare '(Hibakusha)' - this mix is previously unreleased, is more instrumental/electro in places, and lacks the groaning voice samples from the proper '(Hibakusha)'. If you want that mix, it's on the excellent Frankie remix album 'Twelve inches', which Peel apparently hates.

The many highlights include Frankie's 'Rage hard (+)', which Peel has wrongly listed by its sleevenote, 'The young person's guide to the 12" mix', finally on CD in a decent master, and at full length, in place of the muddy ten-minute edit on 'Reload'. I still have the Tommy Boy US 12" of 808 State's 'Cübik', so already have this mix by Frankie Bones & Tommy Musto, but it's a great mix with beautiful detailing. Full marks also for the 'mellow birds mega edit' of 'Pacific 909', which actually does something interesting with this legendary piece, adding trumpet and extra synth lines. The mixes of the lesser-known tracks include pleasant surprises such as Anne Pigalle's lovely 'Souvenir d'un Paris' - fans of France Gall will swoon at this.

excellent selection of remixes from ZZT haydays with great sleeve notes... can't wait for the next one! Saved me digging out old twelve inches...