New windows of opportunity are presenting themselves at an amazing rate, now that digital sampling and recording are becoming a more affordable medium. The low cost of pressing CDs has been the impetus behind several new independent labels sprouting up to release some of the mountain of studio-quality DATs emerging from home studios.

Phantasm Records is one such outfit, enjoying success with what is fast becoming the longterm artform of the techno movement, the mix album. With the best techno being released on 12" and mixed up into a storm by your favourite DJ, it's a natural to exploit the optimum 74.44 minutes running time of CD with a compilation of tracks. This approach has placed a lot of opportunistic cash-in releases out there, usually put together by large record companies who neither know nor love the music, but know a fast buck when they see one. This lack of TLC shows, and until Phantasm's first volume of Hard Trance & Psychedelic Techno there was very little out there in the CD market that really appealed to lovers of the art.

Simon Carman and John Ford are the musicians forming half of a PA collective known as Mindfield, with two DJs making up the other 50%. As such, they are ideally placed to understand techno, and put together compilations featuring mixes of the tracks involved. But it was a stroke of luck that enabled John and Simon, the two partners in Phantasm, to mix the CD entirely in the digital domain, with the resulting clarity and ease of editing the medium affords.

A contact at Korg put the duo in touch with Phil McDonald, one of Korg's sound engineers who was producing his own techno tracks, and he of course had access to the company's Soundlink hard disk recording system. Phil appears on the Hard Trance CDs as Hard Sync and Tao Factor, as well as mixing it in conjunction with Phantasm. An eight track direct-to-disk set up, the Soundlink enables Simon and John to load each number into subsequential pairs of tracks and cross-fade them. They also make full use of the Soundlink's onboard EQ and compression, to even out the differences arising from using tracks from different studios.

But it is their love of techno music that brings the real continuity to Phantasm's CD-format mix-tapes, as Simon explains: "I used to be in rock bands and all that, but rock is just going round in circles these days. Plus I'm over 30 and no longer interested in posing on Top of the Pops. Techno is upfront, contemporary music which is enjoyed and appreciated by young and old alike. What is the alternative at my age? To form a covers band and do the club circuit? I don't think so!

"Mindfield played out to 2000 people heaving up and down at The Source. I can't tell you how good that feels, after you've played in grotty pubs to 15 people! This is a music I can play out and enjoy, without anyone worrying about what I look like. I think a lot of musicians should open up to what techno has to offer."

With two CDs selling like hotcakes, Phantasm hardly need the publicity, but they offered us an exclusive remix of 'Return to Forever' by Temple of Dreams (from the second volume of Hard Trance & Psychedelic Techno), simply because they knew we'd love it too!