Afefe Iku
15 Hours of Party Perfection – Fabric 10th Birthday Review
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 | Event Reviews | 4 Comments
Pictures by Nick Ensing and Nik Torrens from Resident Advisor
The last 10th birthday I attended was about nineteen odd years ago on a Saturday afternoon and it consisted of a bouncy castle, some jelly and ice cream along with a goody bag full of sweets and a slice of cake. Fabric’s 10th birthday however was to say the least a little different. I didn’t really see any jelly and ice cream on offer, although there were bananas and a BBQ for nutritional support. It was lacking a bouncy castle, although you could say the mechanical rodeo bull was a grown up version of it. And the only goody bag you were likely to see would have been the inside of a body bag due to excessive celebration. But what fabric lacked in traditional 10th birthday festivities they totally made up for with their 30 hour marathon and the most impeccable line-up you would ever lay eyes on. The hardest decision was not whether to go but when to go. The guarded set times along with the massive array of talent that were going to play meant you either stayed for the two whole days to catch everyone or picked your time wisely to catch as much as possible.
Despite all the birthday options going off across the capital I ended up plumping for the quite civilised (really? do civilised people do this?) Sunday morning arrival with a quiet Saturday night under my belt. The first taste of fabric came thundering through the floorboards of Smiths, the bar next door to fabric. Popping in to start the day with a fry up, a quick glance across the bar saw a mix of glee and confusion on the faces of the other diners as their plates vibrated across the table to the bass and beats of room 1 pounding through the floor. Quite a surreal experience, especially for those just there for their Sunday paper read and breakfast.
As surreal experiences go that was just the first for the day. On entering the club it was odd to see club casualties crashing out with massive smiles on their faces ready to be replaced by fresh faced party revellers. It was going to be interesting to see how well the sober new comers would mix with the inebriated after partiers, › Continue reading
EarPipe Has an Even Hazier Look Back at the Music Through 2008
Saturday, January 3rd, 2009 | Music, News | 1 Comment
I normally struggle to think what tunes have been and gone in the last month, so trying to remember what I was listening to back in January is a mountainous mission in itself, which is probably why I’m going to write this avoiding any specifics and will talk around the subject pretending I know what I’m talking about like any good politician would do. But from what I can recollect “minimal” became housier (or maybe I became housier?), Dubstep collided with Techno and Disco has undergone a massive revival
So lets start with the shift towards the housier sounds. We noticed a lot of DJs ditching the repetitive and bland “minimal” sounds that were starting to stagnate and instead nudging more towards the house end of the spectrum. This meant a bit more funk and soul embedded into tracks, more vocals and jazzier samples. It may sound like we’re harking back to the funky house days circa 2000-02, but this was slightly different, it was more an amalgamation of what came out of the “minimal-tech” sounds which dominated ’05-’07 with older house music sensibilities as seen from the Chicago deep house days. A perfect example of this is probably My My, their remix of Djuma Soundsytem’s Les Dijnns ’s typifies where the sound was during 2007 whilst their latest release Everybody’s Talkin’ is a glimpse into the house sound doing the rounds at the moment. The same goes for Josh Wink’s Stay Out All Night and Matthew Styles We Said Nothing, both distinctly Chi-town influenced numbers which bebop’s to a fun and funked up skipping rhythm. In a similar vein who could forget Johnny D who’s had a fantastic year. His track Orbitallife was causing raucous everywhere through the summer not to mention all his other releases.
But then it wasn’t all fun funked up house, this year saw a lot of dub style house and techno music with heavy basslines at a relaxed pace. Tracks like Trus’me’s W.A.R Dub particularly stood out as did a lot of the output from Gedde’s new label MurMur which had artists like Bearweasel pumping out deep and hypnotic house. One of the best tracks of the year for me was the highly elusive Wax1001. There was no artist or label, just this white label containing the rawest house track ever. A simple track with clunky beats, classic hi hat patterns and a dark raw bassline made Wax1001 show how less is definitely more.
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