Fabric/Fabriclive mix cd series S/D

The Optimo one of those is the only one I know, but it's excellent.

yeah i gave that one a quick blitz on friday night before going out. it seemed to take a while to get going, but it was really well put together and mixed.

The Optimo and Surgeon are both really good. You'll probably find Carter and Sneak fairly interchangable - doing the high energy Chicago house thing they've always done. I find it a bit relentlessly and strangely joyless these days.

the agoria one is not gothy at all, it's kind of a jazzy detroit techno meets continental maximal house thing

DOG LATIN

i've bought more or less every fabric / fabric live mix, here are the ones i've kept

jams murphy, surgeon, optimo, rub n tug, levon vincent, luke slater, jay haze, bent, deadly avenger, death in vegas, swayzak, autonomic, spank rock, martyn, toddla t, metro area, john tejada, pearson sound, jackmaster, four tet, pinch, shackleton, ame, omar s, aim, dj spinbad, tyler stadius, jacques lu cont, carl craig, global communication, james lavelle, filthy dukes

oh and claude von stroke

i'm very excited for ONEMAN

that's already out and it's not very good

Still going through the blitz of fabric CDs I picked up a month or so ago. Actually, I'm listening to the radio slave one for the first time as I write. 5.5 tracks in it's pretty lifeless and dull in the same way pretty much all of RS' productions are, but that's perfect because I need music like this to write essays too, so it's serving well. I could also see this serving exceptionally well as inoffensive, dinner party background music.

I think I have the Ivan Smagghe one in the car

So I guess here's my (seemingly quite favourable) breakdown of what I have

Michael Mayer: ALL TIME CLASSIC, PERRRRRRRRRFECT!
Ricardo Villalobos: Exceptionally solid
Metro Area: Also very good. Very 'fun'
Omar-S.: Also very good.
Radio Slave: see above
Optimo: Still need to listen to it
James Murphy and Pat Mahoney: One of the most fun mixes I've heard. Luvv this.
Shackleton: Really amazing.
Pearson Sound: Very good, perhaps plays it too safe to be exceptional.
Jackmaster: Pretty good, I guess, but nothing all that special, really.
Four Tet: Great, loads of 'character'

Still would like, but the fact I haven't pounced on them might be telling:
Martyn, Surgeon, Instramental + D Bridge,

Wow, that radioslave mix actually really sucked. The fact that it just ham-fistedly faded out at the end, without any attempt to bring things down first or find closure is just injury + insult.

MARTYN is amazingly dope

i was so disappointed with radio slave! it's just shit boring tribal house. he could've just mixed the best 15-20 rekids tracks and been done with it! but i also note that his own dj mixes and the mixes he's made to promote rekids are in general quite underwhelming

another one i forgot that i would heartily recommend to dog latin would be the new digital soundboy soundsystem one

in particular i think DL would really enjoy that one

i do like the michael mayer one but i have no idea what happened to my copy! i have a bunch of random fabric mixes in storage that *aren't* on that list, maybe i'll dig some of them out ...

cheers - will def check some of those out, particularly DSB.

Listened to Sneak followed by Carter back to back while doing some weed clearance in the garden yesterday. Both were okay - the Sneak one maybe less interesting / more functional than Derrick Carter's mix, but I'm not sure either are 'my style of music'. Still, I guess a lot of these comps work as primers and insights into a particular style, and that's cool.

One of my alltime favourite Fabric ones goes back to its early days - the Radioactiveman mix is a lot of fun. Other than that I've got a handful - Global Communications, Swayzak, Michael Meyer etc... My one complaint with a lot of these is that they often play it very strait and safe - think this may be down to the "I am serious DJ, this big serious Fabric mix" factor. That said they don't all lack humour (Metro Area for example).

The Villalobos one is really good, and a good place to listen to a large chunk of his stuff, similar in that respect to the Omar-S one. Mayer is all time. I have a soft spot for the Glimmers one too, but then I like every mix of theirs I've heard.

I like the Carter one.

My one complaint with a lot of these is that they often play it very strait and safe - think this may be down to the "I am serious DJ, this big serious Fabric mix" factor.

The Ewan Pearson and Ame mixes both struck me as examples of this dynamic.

That reminds me, I forgot to include my summary of:

Ewan Pearson: good-ish. A little too 2007 minimal house. Too clean, and yes, too by the book. Sounds more like a theoretical ideal of a well made mix than something I`d return to over and over.

Pearson's Sci.Fi.Hi.Fi mix from 2005 is fantastic though. Played it in the car this weekend and the last 40 minutes are such a huge rush

Aw man, 'Broken Dream' by Da Fresh! That Summetime Cowboy remix! YESSS!

Yes part of the problem his Fabric mix had was coming off the back of that one.

Oh man, this Surgeon mix is just wonderful!

zip!

yes!

I've just ahem stumbled across an archive of every Fabric mix up until last year and damn the Ben Klock one is great, just zero fannying around at all. Might just sit at home and listen to these all weekend.

excited for prosumer and illum sphere

dont much care for his own music but the illum sphere one is one of the best mixes ive heard this year i think...

who is monki? this one looks good!

Annie Mac protegee, she's like 21 years old and already has her own Radio 1 show. I've never listened to it but that tracklist looks extremely promising.

I've been playing the Monki one all week by the way and it's brilliant, my favourite in quite a while, joining the dots between hard-as-nails percussive bass music and hands-in-the-air gospelized house, with the occasional enthusiastically amateurish MC thrown in.

i was not as impressed but i only gave it a couple of spins

Kinda want TLG to hear the Joris Voorn one just to see what level of red mist it gives him. It's like a big fluffy cloud of microhouse candyfloss, really pretty in some places but at other times I can kinda feel my brain dribbling out of my ear.

i was quite turned off by the size of the track list. i dont have anything against digital - i use traktor myself - but in general i don't care much for the slice-n-dice school of dj'ing. i like ye olde richie hawtin mixes okay but that's about it.

If you'd asked me without looking at the tracklisting I honestly wouldn't have guessed there were so many records involved. But then the same goes for Closer To The Edit.

There are plenty of other reasons why you won't like it though. It's like a more fussy version of some of the wibblier James Holden sets I've seen in my time.

voorn has been making p much shitty trance for a long time

i've been listening to a fair amount of old holden lately - the "balance" and "at the controls" mixes. super good. maybe i should give this voorn one a shot.

anyway i revived this thread because based on the RA review i was expecting the baby ford mix to be a disaster ... which it really isn't. i mean, he certainly phoned it in, but it's not *that* bad.

little behind on this but mathew jonson 👌

That one is excellent, it's pretty much a live set but as such it's better than any individual Mathew Jonson album.

As far as I can tell it's the only good one in quite some time (although the Fabriclive series has been pretty good of late).

When enough water has flown under the bridge, Fabric mix CDs will make up a large part of my early-2000s ephemeral tapestry

I'm halfway through the Alan Fitzpatrick one, which I approached with no real expectations and woah. Festival techno! This is exactly what I want to listen to in June.

Nice to hear Mouth To Mouth again as well.

flava d soon:

https://www.fabriclondon.com/blog/view/newsflash-flava-d-has-mixed-fabriclive-88

Been listening to the Carl Craig one a lot lately

why is flava d getting to do a fabriclive? im sure it wont be bad, but its like, in 2016, why have they not had slimzee do one yet? or spooky? spooky would be incredible. something a bit off about it really.

the EZ one is top 5. maybe THE best fabriclive. makes a mockery of the competition.

Now that this is officially a historical archive we should probably have another go round at repping for the best ones.

Has it been confirmed that the mix series will end?

if it does, there's some sort of sale on their back catalog again. not that I need the physical objects at this point in the game, but... I don't know, I'd like something.

back in the mid-2000s I subscribed to the cd series. being in the middle of the US there were limited possibilities to actually go to a club where I'd see acts like those that played fabric. even the mixes obviously made more for home listening made me feel like I was getting a glimpse into something. the design/artwork and music selection was variable but I always got something out of it. I can't remember when I started... probably shortly after that fabric 13 michael mayer mix.

it's a weird time for released mixes in physical format, or even mixes that are purchased at all. that the fabric ones are still running seems like a throwback at times

many, if not most, of the fabric mixes are on some of the streaming services, though

for a short while i was on the fabric promo groove.
even the promos has a good look and feel to them.
simple basic coloured covers in heavy cardboard.
my faves : omar s, john tejada, commix, noisia,
and when in the mood for an old school hip hop set, dj spinbad.

I'm not sure if it's still out there, but the fabric promo materials (just the press releases and promo images/materials, not music) website was public but relatively un-googleable. I remember grabbing some of the original art in really high resolution, which was excellent for background images.

I don't think it's been confirmed either way but that's hardly going to be at the forefront of their mind right now. I guess they're promotional loss-leaders in any case, they can't possibly make their money back off releasing a whole run of, say, Jesse Rose CDs.

Commercially-released mix albums do feel anachronistic in the age of hundreds of free mixes a week but I think I still engage with them in different ways. Like a mix CD still feels like a DJ releasing an album. A great podcast can be better and a great radio set can be much better but they have that looser, live feel to them. I like the implied permanence of a mix album (also they're usually in better sound quality and you can actually see track titles, which matters to me).

I'm listening to the Glimmers one right now which is the best of the mid-00s bloggy ones (except the James Murphy/Pat Mahoney one which is all time).

Otherwise my top 10 from both series, in no particular order:

Fabric:

Michael Mayer (everyone says this but its true)
Carl Craig
Ellen Allien
Andy Weatherall
Agoria
Claude Vonstroke
Zip
Omar-S
Luciano
Marcel Dettmann

Fabriclive:

Jacques Lu Cont
Bent
The Glimmers
James Murphy & Pat Mahoney
Jackmaster
Toddla T
Elijah & Skilliam
DJ EZ
Flava D
Logan Sama

There are so many terrible-sounding ones I've never bothered to go near, and nearly every DJ has turned out a better mix album for someone else (Mayer's Immer, Pearson's and Luciano's Sci-Fi-Hi-Fi), but I'll sort of miss them if they do stop dropping off the conveyor belt.