From late 2006 to late 2007, the slow death of minimal as the dominant movement in European house and techno seemed like a positive thing. During this era, producers creatively applied the various brands of insectile precision and druggy torpor they'd perfected in tracks with warmer, more organic-feeling sound design inspired by various moments in early 1990s house, not to mention ethnodelic touches ripped from world music of all stripes. The conventional wisdom is that this halfway house between the old futurism and the new traditionalism had been creatively exhausted within about 12 months of its emergence, but it's easy to confuse and conflate a swell of copycat tracks with a bottoming of the creative well. In truth, this sound had barely scratched the surface when trends shifted to a somewhat stultifying brand of straightjacketed house and techno classicism. Admittedly, it doesn't help that so much of this warmer "deep" minimalism got a bit, well, bad, with artists deploying African chant samples or tepid bongo performances with a grim air of necessity.
It's almost comforting, then, to find that Radio Slave's mix for Fabric sounds almost like a tribute to 2007, in the best sense. Here's a reminder of when this sound seemed filled with promise, with its near-seamless blend of lush, hypnotic minimal-into-house, endlessly percolating synth patterns, and softly clanking percussion. Of course, it's not like Radio Slave could have done differently: having spent the last couple of years making of himself the go-to-guy for infinitely patient, mind-altering house, the dude (real name Matt Edwards) suddenly reforming himself as a U.S. deep house disciple would have seemed particularly tasteless. As it is, the producer's decision to remain true to his initial aesthetic (and that of his label, Rekids) is an excellent outcome, offering a precarious extension of life for a sound that in some ways has suffered from a premature creative foreclosure.
Of course, the reasons people would eye-roll over such a prospect are present and correct: As you might expect from a guy whose own tracks can be so long and repetitive, where the only options left are ecstatic meditation or total coma, there are times when Fabric 48 gets a little, well, dry and desiccated. Nina Kravis's "Pain in the Ass" is the kind of hyper-minimal bleep track that everyone would ignore if not for the (not even terribly compelling) detached female monologue over the top-- typically, it's one of the best-known tracks here. Likewise, if there's a point to the unrelieved kickdrum pound of the following track "Balada Redo" by DJ Boola, I'm missing it.
But maybe these moments are necessary. Perhaps the asceticism of Edwards' approach gives the flashes of color and melody just that little bit of extra luster needed to push them over the top. So the horn samples on Brothers' Vibe's "Platter Sugar" sound celebratory rather than merely diverting, while the rolling piano and scintillating percussion of Michel Cleis' remix of Spencer Parker's "The Beginning" can seem near-life-changing. Part of Edwards' talent and skill is that his negotiation of the narcoleptic and the arm-waving actually intensifies the highs rather than simply subjecting the listener to unnecessary lows.
Michel Cleis reappears late in the mix with the marvelous (relative) anthem "La Mezcla", its trilling flute line and layered Spanish vocals providing what would be the set's peak if it made sense to think of it in those terms. The tune-- catchy, inventive, "deep" (not just in the sense of "deep house", but in the sense of bewitching layering, each listen allowing you to catch some new nuance)-- is a telling reminder that this particular sound was never about simply slapping a bongo pattern on top of a 10-minute groove anymore than minimal was "about" fashioning rhythm loops out of the sound of cockroaches fornicating. Rather, it's about the delicate interplay between old and new, between flesh and metal, between solipsistic drug taking and vicarious global tourism. More simply, it's about interplay in itself, and the fact that sometimes music on its way from one place to another can be much more exciting and, well, fun, than music that's arrived at its destination. I won't mind if Edwards remains creatively stuck for a little while longer.
