Nothing says “peak content” like a DJ mix. Proliferating for free online, they’re a dime a terabyte. A kind of cognitive dissonance hangs over many: Suggesting club energy but far removed from actual nightclubs, they offer a simulacrum of nightlife. They also serve a more mercenary purpose: Many DJs’ mixes double as business cards; Fabric’s reasonably priced mix series is essentially an advertisement for the London nightclub, where cover and service charges might run you $38 or more. But every now and then, the elements align and something more transcendent results. That is the case with Midland’s debut commercial mix CD, one of the year’s best, and one with the potential to resonate far beyond dance-music diehards.
Midland—the UK’s Harry Agius—has been making records for seven years now, yet he’s hardly a household name. That might have something to do with the fact that he has never aligned himself with any one style. (It doesn’t help that he’s never released an album, only singles and EPs.) His early records hewed to the voluminous contours and syncopated grooves of early-2010s UK bass, but he’s also made tough, rattling techno and dreamy deep house; last year, he dipped his toe into new wave-flavored waters with the coolly melodic “Blush.” And his “Final Credits,” a sleek disco stepper that was caned for months before its official December release, unexpectedly became one of the year’s definitive anthems. Mixmag named it their No. 1 track of 2016. On YouTube, it has been played more than 547,000 times in the past nine months, and on Spotify, the song’s two mixes have netted well over a million plays.
The most immediate thing that Midland’s Fabriclive mix shares in common with his own productions is that it also covers a wide stretch of stylistic ground. Listeners who know Midland primarily from “Final Credits” may be surprised to find nary a lick of disco here. But to call it a techno mix doesn’t come close to capturing either the range or the nuance of his set. It favors muted tone colors, hypnotic grooves, and enveloping atmospheres; rattling breakbeats alternate with purring machine rhythms and extended beatless stretches, and brand-new records rub up against deep cuts from the 1990s. Emphasizing long, natural segues and subtly harmonic blends, it is intricate but never fussy, understated but never shy.
Unless you’re intimately familiar with the tracks in the mix—and, given their scattered provenance, it seems unlikely that many listeners will know more than a handful of them—it may not be immediately apparent how much of what you hear is a product of his active mixing. Listen to his selections on their own, then listen to the way they work in the context of the mix, and you can hear how he’s often layering two tracks across two, three, or four-minute stretches. Some DJs prefer to let tracks play out in full, crossfading only in the final bars, but Midland appears intent upon keeping any two given songs playing simultaneously as much as possible. At times, it seems like as soon as one record has left the turntable, he’s reaching for its successor’s replacement. Still, nothing here feels hurried or rushed. Tracks flow naturally from one to the next, their elements complementing each other the way two siblings might finish one another’s sentences. Even in the rare cases where he abruptly shifts gears—like when LFO’s dreamy ambient-techno cut “Ultra Schall” slips sideways into Kowton’s sharp-elbowed “Pea Soup”—the changes happen so naturally that you may not even notice them.
Not only does the mix progress effortlessly from one track to the next; the whole set follows a single, flowing arc, albeit one marked by a few unexpected gestural movements. Following a tentative, scene-setting introduction from the New York experimental duo Georgia, he proceeds through a series of progressively deeper tracks like Jaures’ clattering “Silence (Before Birth),” Juju & Jordash’s drifting, vibey “Monday Mellow,” and Leif’s chiming “Shoulders Back.” As talking drums strike up a kind of conversation with Leif’s bell tones, Roman Flügel’s “Warm and Dewy” marks the set’s second phase, which tumbles across a short sequence of wriggly drum tracks. Beatrice Dillon’s “Halfway” offers a rare moment of levity with a cartoon-reggae bassline that cuts through her dank, clanking drums.
Samo DJ & Pedrodollar’s bleepy, carefree “Track #3” makes a low-key setup for the set’s first big peak: Mannequin Lung’s “City Lights (Mr. Hazeltine Remix feat. Divine Styler),” a reworked 1998 tune from Los Angeles’ Plug Research label that imagines a galaxy of streetlights spreading out beneath a vantage point high in the Hollywood hills. It’s a stunning move—an obscure cut that even many techno heads may have forgotten, if they knew it at all, and used in a way that packs a real emotional punch.
From here, Midland uses Sugai Ken’s beatless “Mukashi” as a tonal palate cleanser before plunging into a long, immersive stretch of techno, much of it from the late ’90s. There are fewer stylistic surprises here than in the first half of the mix, but the selections are eye-opening and the mixing flawless. The rolling, spring-loaded techno of Santos Rodriguez’ “Road to Rio - B1”—a 1999 production by Arthur Smith, aka Artwork, of the dubstep supergroup Magnetic Man, of all things—layers in key with Slobban’s swirling “Amour!,” another unheralded 1999 production; the dubby, sci-fi atmospheres of Convextion’s “Distant Transmission” downshift into Shinichi Atobe’s nostalgic, jazz-tinged “Free Access Zone 2.”
Finally, Agius indulges in a warm-down session that he extends for nearly nine minutes: Vito Ricci’s droning “Deep Felt Music,” Jesper Dahlbäck and Mark O’Sullivan’s downbeat “When I Was Young,” and, last of all, Midland’s own deeply tranquil synth study “First Tube,” exclusive to the mix. It says something about his low-key nature that, unlike some grandstanding DJs, he’s made his own contribution to the mix the most unassuming of all; it says something about his commitment to mood-building that he serenades us out with three successive, complementary outros. As the music fades, we hear birdsong in the distance; it feels like stumbling out of the club into the morning—ears ringing, pulse slowing, the world aglow. Perhaps there’s a little bit of clubland fantasizing woven into Fabriclive 94, too; fortunately, its pleasures are as real as you could hope for.
