Dave Seaman — Renaissance: The Masters Series Part 3: Desire

Release details

• ArtistDave Seaman
• Year2001
• LabelRenaissance
• Format2 × CD
• SeriesRenaissance: The Masters Series
• Catalogue numberREN04CD

Desire feels more settled than Awakening

Look at the track times. The first track runs over nine minutes. Janeiro gets nine and a half. Jimmy Van M gets nearly ten, Junkie XL eight and a half. Seaman is building sets here, not rushing through records.

Compared to Awakening, the production is cleaner, the low end heavier and the genre boundaries fewer. Desire is the sound of a DJ who knows exactly where he is going.

CD1: from soulful house to darker pressure

A Guy Called Gerald's Humanity, in Ashley Beedle's Love And Compassion mix, is a brilliant way to start — soulful, rolling, unhurried. Minimalistix and Finley Quaye in the François K mix are unexpected neighbours that work, and the Path a cappella threaded through it is the kind of construction that only exists inside this mix.

Lovesky's Drums 4 Better Daze darkens everything, and Moby's Southside in Pete Heller's mix works as the crossover record. Then Janeiro takes over — nine and a half minutes of melody given room to breathe, the bridge from the warmer opening to the darker half.

From there: Breathe makes the room darker without killing the emotion, Void sounds like 2001 in the best way, Deliver Me changes the emotional state entirely, Sputnik stops things getting sentimental, and Tom Middleton's mix of Ruhe is an actual ending. A complete disc.

The voices are shadows, not singalongs

Listen to what Seaman does with the vocals. The Path’s Praying is threaded through Finley Quaye rather than announced as a separate event. On CD2, Ben Shaw’s So Strong hovers over Slacker, then Placebo’s Passive Aggressive is detached from the band and laid across Oracle.

None of those moments behaves like a conventional vocal-house payoff. The voices are memory, tension and colour. They make the records underneath feel briefly haunted, then disappear before you can settle into them.

That is the craft Desire hides in plain sight. The famous names catch your eye on the sleeve, but the pleasure is in hearing Seaman turn them into material for a different piece of music.

CD2 is darker almost immediately

Loafer's Travelogue, Elisium's Part One and Nat Monday's Waiting set a moodier tone from the off. Roland Klinkenberg's Inner Laugh, in James Holden's mix, is exactly why Holden mattered, and Blackwatch and Slacker get murkier still — with the So Strong a cappella and the Placebo vocal over Digby & Olivier's Oracle used as texture rather than feature.

Jimmy Van M's Love Like Sleep gets nearly ten minutes to work as pure atmosphere, then Junkie XL restores the muscle and Praha's Pachinko makes the final push. And of course it ends with Mindcircus. Way Out West, six minutes, the lights coming up.

Desire is less about anthems than memory. Set against Awakening it is a development, not a replacement — and it holds up through pacing alone.

Why Desire works better as two discs than a playlist

CD1 and CD2 are not duplicates with slightly different track selections. The first begins with humanity, soul and room to breathe, then steadily closes the walls. The second starts deeper, stays murkier and saves its clearest emotional release for Mindcircus at the very end.

That contrast needs time. Janeiro matters because of the darker records waiting beyond it. Jimmy Van M matters because Seaman lets the atmosphere sit before Junkie XL gives the mix its muscle back. Every long track time is part of the argument.

Owning Desire means owning that argument intact: two deliberate arcs, one warm-to-dark progression and a finale that feels earned. Skip around and it is a strong pile of records. Play the CDs properly and it becomes a place you want to go back to.

Related on The Mix Archive

• The Renaissance collection
• Dave Seaman's DJ profile
• Dave Seaman — Renaissance: The Masters Series Part 1: Awakening
• Dave Seaman & Robert Miles — Renaissance Worldwide: London
• Dave Seaman — Global Underground 022: Melbourne

Own Desire because you want the mix back

The route is the product: Humanity into Janeiro, Breathe, Void, Deliver Me and Ruhe on CD1, then Travelogue, Holden, Slacker, Jimmy Van M, Junkie XL and Mindcircus on CD2. That sequence does not exist anywhere else — only on these two discs.