Kieran Hebden has always been singled out for his adventurous tastes and the way his disparate obsessions have been seamlessly melded into his own stylistically restless music. Hebden listened without prejudice, a value prized by both the post-rock and DJ communities he came out of at the tail end of the 1990s. Even as eclecticism took a beating in the early 2000s, with mash-up acts and bedroom DJs turning the whole idea into a one-note joke or a cheap way to get noticed, Hebden never shied away from mixing it all up, provided the whole felt greater than the trick of joining seemingly incompatible parts.
Fabric has made a point of flagging Hebden's new mix for its sonic and conceptual unity. Certainly it does feel all of a piece compared to his last commercially released mix, a 2006 installment for the DJ-Kicks series that swerved from Akufen to Animal Collective. By contrast, Fabriclive 59 sticks pretty consistently to one scene. But it's a restless scene built on a premise of constant reinvention: UK garage, which from the late 1990s to the early 2000s mutated from a simultaneously roughed-up and opulent take on house music to the fierce and rap-derived clang-and-bang of grime.
So already we've got the promise and surprise inherent in a famously eclectic selector bringing a freshness and fearlessness to music usually only spun by purist DJs sticking to music from within the scene. On that level, Hebden doesn't disappoint. For one thing, he includes ringers from way outside late-90s London, like Ricardo Villalobos. And despite their modern, weirdo-techno palette of sounds, these left-field inclusions fit perfectly with the vibe of the old-school tunes, especially the way someone like Villalobos treats his own heavily syncopated drums. As usual, it's to Hebden's credit as a DJ that he hears ways to join old and new that others might not.
But this is also a pretty unexpected and exciting way to tackle a big-time commission from Fabric, especially considering the Fabriclive series tends to focus on up-to-the-minute dance sounds rather than the archival impulse. UK garage as an inventive and real-time underground phenomenon already seems a distant part of dance history, despite being only about a decade gone. So for longtime garage heads, Hebden's obsessive crate-digging will provide them with lots of unfamiliar and almost lost-to-history moments of genius. I've spent more time tracking this stuff down than I care to admit, and I recognize only a couple of the vintage tunes here. But Fabriclive 59 will also expose Four Tet fans who come from entirely different worlds (indie, IDM) to some truly luscious and forward-thinking dance music that's otherwise available only on out-of-print vinyl singles and even-more-out-of-print CD comps.
Despite his rep as a boundary-crosser not beholden to any one scene, Hebden has deep roots here as an engaged fan. The B-side to one of his first Four Tet singles, "Calamine", was an avant take on UK garage when almost no one in the rock or electronic worlds seemed to be paying attention. It's easy to see what appealed to him. UKG fulfilled dance music's no. 1 rule (keep it funky) while also sticking to a less-often-followed guideline (make that funk feel new again). Few producers at the time were doing as much to reinvent the art of beatmaking without trying for something expressly "experimental" and alienating clubbers along the way.
So if you're a fan of those moments in rap or dance when baffling syncopations become an art in themselves, when drum patterns feel like they couldn't possibly be played by a human with just two arms, you'll find a lot to love here. And if you like your mixes to have the smooth bump and ingratiating warmness of house, amazingly, this music also fits the bill. After all, the earliest UK garage cuts, like Persian's "Feel da Vibe", weren't so far from house's more steady sense of groove. It just had a lot more swing. Making broken-sounding rhythms swing was actually the primary goal of the best garage DJs, and Hebden proves himself very attuned to making all these not always mix-friendly rhythms flow together. So much so that, when he drops Musical Mob's "Pulse X"-- the stomping and snarling and totally blunt track that announced grime as a new thing-- it seems to fit naturally with all these super-subtle syncopations.
But true to Hebden's status-- insider fan trying to rekindle the UKG vibe and outsider after-the-fact archivist not beholden to the scene's rules-- Fabriclive 59 doesn't really play out like a true vintage garage mix would have. For one thing, our DJ has some formalist fun with the disc's structure. After building a stretch of groove, he lets things simmer down, bridging the sections with sampled crowd noise from the Fabric club itself, less breaking the mix's momentum than allowing a breather before things bubble back to life. The effect is like catching a pirate radio DJ in the mix, only to dial across the airwaves and find another just-as-good set on a different station. Keeping listeners on their toes while also mimicking the way this music was often heard by fans-- it's an odd but effective approach, especially considering the usual keep-the-party-going Fabriclive style. Fabriclive 59 feels more like a mixtape in the handcrafted sense, one friend making another a tape of special moments they may have missed. But of course few of us have a friend with the mixing skills or deep record collection of Kieran Hebden.
