In dance music, genre is often woven into an artist’s DNA. It’s not uncommon for a DJ/producer to pick a lane and stick with it for the next 10 or 20 years. Skream, on the other hand, is proof of just how far you can travel from your origins. The UK producer, born Oliver Jones, is part of dubstep’s original generation; he came up back when the bass-heavy style was strictly a niche concern, and his foundational single “Midnight Request Line” is virtually synonymous with its subterranean origins. As a member of transatlantic crossover behemoths Magnetic Man, he’s also representative of that moment in the early 2010s when dubstep went overground. (It’s almost mind-boggling to think that an artist with roots in dingy South London basements would also figure on compilations like this one alongside Skrillex, Calvin Harris, and Kaskade.)
By the time dubstep’s popularity cratered, though, Skream had moved on. By 2013—the year of Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories—he, too, had gotten the disco bug. His single “Rollercoaster” was a cheesy whiff of falsetto-led funk; his contribution to Pete Tong’s All Gone Miami 2013 2CD was a mix of middle-of-the-road house. It was a 180 so sharp that it looked a little mercenary at the time. Five years later, a regular fixture in places like Space Ibiza, Skream has settled into a comfortable kind of second adolescence, banging out reliable and rather faceless crowdpleasers, full of Pavlovian filter sweeps and chunky tech-house shuffle, as well as moodier excursions with more character and purpose. He is, frankly, a maddeningly inconsistent DJ.
His Fabriclive suffers from the same lack of focus. It can’t decide quite what it wants to be—a history lesson, a showcase of state-of-the-art house, or a boisterous Friday night stocked with sugary low-hanging fruit. It gets off to a promising start. The chirping saxophone of Hieroglyphic Being’s “Ashrams” makes for a wonderfully unexpected opener; the Salon des Amateurs resident Bufiman’s “Peace Moves,” with its echo of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s “B-2 Unit,” is a strange and captivating blend of vapor and solid, of then and now. And James Burton’s newly released “Sounds of a Different Colour (Kincaid & Sinàl Remix)” merits the full six and a half minutes he devotes to it: It’s funky and atmospheric, full of odd sounds and unusual fireworks.
But things quickly get confused. By track five, the rolling bass of Rundell’s “Jack the Bass” goes down like a Jäger bomb on a too-crowded dancefloor. A conga-hammering Latin house two-fer from Skream and his Magnetic Man cohort Artwork (the latter in a 1999 outing as Santos Rodriguez) comes on as excitable as a gaggle of clubbers bursting from a bathroom stall. In this context, Floorplan’s gospel-sampling “Made Up in My Mind” feels almost sacrilegious.
If you’re only including 14 tracks in a 75-minute mix, they need to fit together like puzzle pieces, and each one needs to be essential. That is not the case here. Radio Slave’s “Screaming Hands (Krautdrums Mix),” all nine minutes of it, lands like a boulder from the sky between the Floorplan track and Sascha Funke’s key-clashing “MZ.” Skream regains his footing for the final stretch: Greg Venezia’s thrilling, Detroit-inspired “Lies” is big-room done right; two tracks later, Skream dusts off a 24-year-old slice of bleepy intelligent techno from LA Synthesis, a tune so revelatory that including it here feels like a public service. But Steve Murphy’s chilly electro tune that joins them constitutes such a change in energy and air temperature that it’s almost like wandering from the main floor to the side room and back again. Here, just a few tracks from the end, Skream still can’t quite settle on a vibe.
