For many of us elec­tronic beat heads, Mary Anne Hobbs has long been a sort of patron saint of the music. My first mem­ory of her is the Mo Wax set she hosted on Breeze­block, a blind­ing set of exper­i­men­tal down­tempo music. Her plunge into dub­step in 2006 cul­mi­nated in one of the sin­gle most impor­tant radio shows of elec­tronic music, the 2 hour “Dub­step Warz” spe­cial. Wild Angels is her third com­pi­la­tion for Planet Mu and the best by far. Mark Pritchard’s opener “?” is a sequel to the ambi­ent con­clu­sion of his Har­monic 313 album When Machines Exceed Human Intel­li­gence, a sub­tle and organic tableau of syn­thetic washes and a del­i­cate wind­ing melody. While emi­nent super­star Hud­son Mohawke pushes the energy up with the video game melodies and beat swag­ger of “Spot­ted,” a fun and dynamic exam­ple of his sound, the always smooth Mike Slott brings us his own ver­sion of soul­ful hip-hop with “Knock Knock” and ris­ing star Gemmy gets pur­ple with the synth crazy dub­step work­out of “Rain­bow Rd.” The dou­ble remix header of Paul White’s take on Tranqill’s Pay­roll” and the stel­lar Take rework of Architeq’s “Sleep­ing Bear Lament” rep­re­sent two of the strongest tracks, full of rolling thick bass, and unfurl­ing melodies of elec­tronic rip­ples. Another stand­out is the burly “Gut­ter Music VIP” from Starkey, a mon­ster glitchy dub­step track, with big slap­ping beats and fre­netic oscil­la­tions that slowly give way to an epic sec­ond half full of syn­co­pated synths and large washes of gran­u­lar sounds. Against this big track, Darkstar’s “Video­tape” is all the more frag­ile and emo­tional, the lead organ mir­ror­ing the vocoder telling it’s sad story. Never have elec­tron­ics given such a heart­felt per­for­mance than this pow­er­ful track. Which can be said for Wild Angels as a whole, a huge and var­ied col­lec­tion of the most excit­ing sounds on the planet.