Chris Fortier

Further proof that the U.S. DJ scene is getting respect globewide, Hoboken-based Chris Fortier comes to town on the heels of his new double-disc mix CD for John Digweed's Bedrock label, Bedrock Compiled and Mixed Chris Fortier. (The 24 tracks fit together much smoother than the words in the title, but, of course.) The third installment in Bedrock's ongoing series, following DJ Hyper and (Fortier's business partner in Balance Promote Group) Jimmy Van M, Fortier's cut-and-save blends on-the-verge exclusives (Universal Agents' "Solomonic Agents," Meat Katie's "My Little Dancing Girl" and Coco da Silva's "@Night," among others) with digging-in-the-crates rarities (Dearboy's "Greyclouds (Drumclub mix)"), while showing off his own studio skills on "Losing Wait." With sweat leaking out of the 0's and 1's, it's a worthwhile addition to a form (and too often, a formula) that spills more non-essential product into record racks than a decade's worth of Bad Boy Records product. A couple of months ago, Damian Higgins (better known as Dieselboy, perhaps the country's best drum 'n' bass jock) spit venom at the many inferior mix discs that clog the arteries of most record stores: "You go to the electronica section of Best Buy and grab some mix CDs, and most of these CDs, some schmo DJ fucking picked out 15 tunes that he or she likes, maybe tunes that are big, that are in their box, and OK, they mix them together." While Fortier's latest entry probably doesn't better Dieselboy's carefully assembled concepts (such as this year's excellent projectHUMAN), it holds its own in terms of song selection; even if you don't know it took him five months to piece together a track list (it did), it sounds like it. And Wednesday, you can hear him do it live.