DJ T.'s initial releases for Get Physical (the label he co-runs with M.A.N.D.Y. and Booka Shade) were paragons of discofied house deepness meets sparkly synth euphoria, and they sparked the electro-house crossover moment that Get Physical has spent the past four years and a variety of incarnations worrying about how to maintain. During this later period, T. (real name Thomas Koch) seemed like the mainstay producer with the shortest shelf life, clinging on through the minimal era, but never quite recovering from the passing of Metro Area-style electro-disco fetishism and Chicago House revivalism, from which his earliest and finest records cribbed so heavily.
But if DJ T.'s contribution to the gargantuan Fabric series is a bit (well, a lot) tardy, it also suggests that even a stopped clock will eventually be on time again. Now that so few people know or care what's next in European house, Koch finds himself on a relatively even playing field, and he capitalizes in part by returning to his roots and in part by venturing further afield. Most of Fabric 51 rides the sort of loose, low-slung disco grooves that typified seven-year-old Koch tracks like "Philly" and "Freemind". But where once there was a serious, good-drugs air of lush expansiveness, Koch's new mix is dominated by quirky, weird-drugs arrangements with quirkier vocals. The record's idiosyncratic lurch from idea to discombobulated idea recalls contemporary German house's canon of perverse iconoclasts-- DJ Koze, Matias Aguayo, dOP.
In truth, Koch has always leant harder to the left in his official mixes than his own productions or typical DJ sets would suggest; Fabric 51 mostly builds on the oddball muse he chased on 2006's Body Language Vol. 2 and 2007's Monza.Club.Ibiza Compilation.Vol.2., both of which included woozy Koze productions. And it's Koze in particular, with his unfussy, even messily disorienting layered grooves, who looms large over this mix, though Koch unleashes him only at the end with the airsick drones, stutters, and eerie harmonized vocals of his remix of WhoMadeWho's "Keep Me in My Plane". It's a predictable highlight, but otherwise most of the time all those slightly unhinged percussion assemblages and ostentatiously disruptive vocals serve only to underscore the power of the more straight-ahead moments: the sly, jazz-inflected African house of Madioko 'N' Rafika's "Ellelli (Kalabrese Remix)" or the classic U.S. deep house of DJ Le Roi's "I Get Deep" with its hypnotic preacher man monologue from Roland Clark.
Which is not to say that T. missed a trick by going so quirky so hard and so often. More precisely, the issue is that ultimately Koch's got a crowdpleaser's ear, and his selections yearn toward a gregarious tunefulness even when playing at being difficult. Even Aguayo's grimly rigorous mixture of South African percussion and stripped-down tuff DJ Rush-style house on "Pata Pata" is at root a story of two big hooks. I could wish Koch would let his obvious tendencies run free a bit more often, but when they arrive the pay-offs are big enough to compensate for their brevity, as the delirious, bittersweet bleepy disco of Crazy P's remix of DJ Mujava's "Township Funk" demonstrates. It does sound an awful lot like an old DJ T. classic in fact, but even with all the cosmopolitan hijinks crammed onto Fabric 51, it's hard to imagine why you'd want it otherwise.
