Let's say you're on the dancefloor at a nightclub. The DJ is a few minutes into a set. He has just played a popular song, and the floor is now packed with writhing, sweaty bodies. For the next twenty minutes, he plays music that, while not really recognizable or even particularly compelling, keeps the beat pumping and holds down the dancefloor attrition level. Border Crossing is basically an entire disc of that music -- deep house and trance-type material in the 125 to 140 BPM range.

By themselves, none of these songs would cause full-on monotony; most of them are at least interesting enough to shake your ass to for five minutes. The beats are heavy, the rhythms smooth -- perhaps a little too smooth. There's little tempo variation between songs, and nothing terribly exciting happens to break up the constant 4/4 thump-a-thon. There are intriguing elements -- the crisped but phat IDM-disco beats and sampled frog call of Dean Decosta's stripped-down "No Habla Espanol", the frenetic rhythm of Lucas Rodenbush and Alonso Ordonez's "Plontek", and the cheesy, eighties-style sci-fi disco of a.J.Scent's "Moonlight in Vermont", the disc's most distinctive track -- but in general, this is material best suited to that portion of the evening in which you've secured your nine square feet of dancefloor space and put your body on the dancing equivalent of autopilot.