DJ-mix series come and go, but the paired Fabric and FabricLive mixes have so far issued 80 CDs. To see how they stack up as a whole, we’re reviewing them in numerical order, and very loosely: in some cases I will only have played the mixes only once or twice.

Fabric 03: Jon Marsh (March 2002)
For an ignorant Yank like me, Jon Marsh is one of those names I see in British DJ magazines but don’t know much about beyond his having been a member of the early-’90s band the Beloved. Six-and-a-half years after the fact, what I glean from this mix is that he’s an epic-house guy whose sense of scale is relatively modest–and that, for at least these 73 minutes, he’s got very good ears. Lots of strings, mostly zingy and sharp, accent not mood, spotlight flashes not dawn over city. Percussion that buoys the basic four instead of representing for po-faced back-in-the-day realness, even when most “wet,” i.e. aping that of Timo Maas’s “Doom’s Night” remix–which should help situate it, very generally. You haven’t heard of the artists; you probably don’t know the tracks as tracks. But if you like mixes as mixes, this one’s very solid.