**1/2 Kimball Collins

INTERNATIONAL CLUB UNION . . . SESSION 1

(Max/ICU)

Neither as deep as New York house nor as ethereal as the symphonic luster of Italian dance music, DJ Kimball Collins's debut CD tries to find a sonic middleground between these two extremes. As with all musical middlegrounds, however, his mostly halfway blend of trancy effects, medium beats, and spacy drop-ins offers barely a soupçon of the surprise that makes dancers scream and fly. The seamlessness of Collins's mixes only emphasizes the uniformity of his program. The dancer is guided away from, rather than into, those few moments (for example, the tribal beats and robot noises of Travel's "Bulgarian," the melodic swoop of Energy 52's "Café del Mar '98," and the Nico-like wisp who fem-cees The Age of Love's "Age of Love") when his sound does swoop out of orbit. Eventually it becomes clear, and perhaps interesting to those with patience, that Collins-space is rich with objects of desire and fantasy. Extravagance and hooks would make that clearer still, and far more interesting.

-- Michael Freedberg