Feeling The Fabric: Tech-House Gets Superclubby

DJ-mix series come and go, but the paired Fabric and FabricLive mixes have demonstrated a surprising longevity. To see how they stack up as a whole, I’ll be reviewing them here every Wednesday, in numerical order. This will be very loose: in some cases I will only have played the mixes only once or twice, though I’ve doted on a few for a while. I will also go back to earlier volumes if one deserves sufficient reappraisal, though I won’t skip ahead chronologically, so we’ll get to everything in its time. This time, a professional hipster plays with breakbeats while a tech-house guy gets a little superclubby.

FabricLive 01: James Lavelle (December 2001)
In the UK, it seems, James Lavelle is a kind of folk hero for having helped codify the breakbeat-driven cool of the post-hip-hop aspects of mid-’90s UK dance culture. In America, he’s a relic. Guess which one wins out on this collection? Hint: I’m American. It does not begin promisingly: a computer voice informs us that Lavelle is going to entertain all our taste buds in pretty much the exact way you’d expect him to, all the way up to ending with Radiohead. But it makes sense as a starter for the FabricLive series on late-coming cool points; in fact, his tendrils poking into rock stardom and the like make it easy to imagine they devised the companion series just to get Lavelle involved. In truth, he doesn’t do badly, scoring a scenic enough sequence with (what do you know) seven-and-a-half minutes of Howie B as its pivot, and even as things become more generic Lavelle has the grace to make pit stops in genres other than the breakbeat-driven to balance things out. As a result, the whole shifts with each play enough to make me wonder if it isn’t better than I think. But I’d have to like it a lot more to try and find out.

Fabric 02: Terry Francis (January 2002)
Ah, tech-house. It’s good to hear you again. This is not an eventful set: Francis’s records are picked carefully, and they build a single, essentially even mood, and it’s not one with enough distinguishing markers to keep you excited about the style’s possibilities, the way Michael Mayer’s Immer or Triple R’s Friends do for their glossier, more artful versions/visions of the template. There are big differences, though. For one thing, Francis likes vocals, especially vocals that evoke desire, from the porn-shudders of DJ Buck’s “Ode to Mad Marj” to the processed female ooohs of Gideon Jackson’s “Ooh Yi Yi” and Haris & Stubbs’ closing “My Love.” For another, his sensibility seems distinguishably English to me, not least because he skirts the superclubby so frequently. In itself it’s not an exciting direction, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a few techno lovers got deeper into the more Kompakt/Perlon/Force Tracks end of things through Francis, and the road runs the other way when he slips in a record like the genuinely spooky machine-trance throwback “Doing Shows,” by Floppy Sounds.