Richie Hawtin/Sven Vath

Filled with druggy samples of airport lobbies, steak dinners, car rides and beach parties, Windsor tech guru Richie Hawtin and German legend Sven Vath use Sound of the Third Season to capture the vibe of their weekly Cocoon parties on the famed clubbing island of Ibiza. "Driving around the island between the after-hours and the main party, playing new records we're all into, getting ourselves hyped up, all of that was part of it," Hawtin says. "It's really progressive, really futuristic, funky and fun all at the same time. It's just a fucking good party." Sure sounds like it. The dynamic duo has assembled a pretty serious collection of underground techno and house tracks from the likes of Swayzak, Ricardo Villalobos, Technasia, Reinhart Voight and Vath himself. The music gets progressively weirder as Hawtin takes more control on the latter half of the disc, representing the more experimental daytime after parties, but there is a pummelling consistency throughout, despite the momentum-slowing atmospherics. "We wanted to do something really special together this year for this CD, to put both of our stamps on it and say, 'people, the island isn't what everybody thinks it is. It has something for everybody,'" Hawtin says, dispelling Ibiza's rep as a hedonistic morass of cheesy trance and obvious house. "For some, the commercial side may be played-out, but for a more underground side, a techno side, I think it's just beginning. Cocoon was unbelievable this year but it hasn't reached its peak yet, no way."