This brilliant best-of album disguised as a mix-cd makes a timely appearance now that DJ Hell's International DeeJay Gigolo Records, after filling dance floors for years, is gathering mainstream attention with alarming speed. 'American Gigolo' cleverly pushes the label's most populist agents to the front: Tiga, the man of the hour thanks to his electrofied cover of 'Sunglasses At Night' (basically the philosophy of International DeeJay Gigolo Records in a nutshell) is behind the controls and Miss Kittin & The Hacker's work is heavily featured in the mix. Despite Tiga's own populist retro work the weight of the back catalogue inevitably pulls the album towards a pleasurable mix between electro, house and techno. The way things ought to be.

On to the highlights. Tiga brilliantly fuses Jeff Mills' 'Theme From 2000' with Terence Fixmer's 'Out In The Space', creating one of those dialectic moments in which the genius of techno shines in its most pure form (and instantly restored my waning faith in Mr. Mills). Another essential segment features the best track of the cd, Vitalic's insane 'You Prefer Cocaine' a massive wave of pleasure that is cheekily mixed into The Hacker's remix of 'Soul on Soul' by Marc Almond. Pleasure is the keyword, the Gigolo aesthetic of nasty humor on the dance floor reaches something of an apotheosis when Dopplereffekt's devilish witty 'Porno Actress' halfway levitates thanks to the insertion of Trike's 'Talk Back', the moment the bass drum kicks is such a perfect encapsulation of the beauty of dance that it almost makes you want to write heavy tomes on 'Being and the Beat'.

What this mix-cd represents beyond some really, really good dance music is also a vision of a true European culture, that thing depressed philosophers thought was gone forever. They weren't looking in the right place of course. This label based in Munich becomes the center of a new European art, which effortlessly incorporates North Americans like Tiga and Jeff Mills (who is more European than most people who actually live here). A vision of Europe as a mixture of music, attitude, style, humor, glamour, decadence, dreams, history and futurism that will always be more essential than the little schemes of little men in Strasbourg.