Indie culture's post-DFA embrace of dance music in all its forms-- acid, minimal, disco, and so on-- has been sneered at by some anxious veteran ravers for its apparent new-jack bandwagoneering, as if louver-shade kids are gonna go around smearing guitars all over everything with their Axe body spray-stained fingers. But the best ideas often come from people with an outsider's idea of-- and, better yet, a flippant disregard for-- scene and genre rules. And if these outsiders wind up connecting a few new dots-- even if by some naïve, happy accident-- well, that's how stasis gets disrupted, ain't it?
Not that James Ford and Jas Shaw are clueless interlopers or anything. It's just that going back and listening to pre-Mobile Disco-era Simian albums like Chemistry Is What We Are and We Are Your Friends-- in dance terms, vaguely Madchester at best-- makes a mix like their installation in the FabricLive series, even in the wake of their acid-savvy Attack Decay Sustain Release, sound like the end result of one hell of a metamorphosis. But FabricLive 41 doesn't reveal much in the way of curriculum-- few tracks betray anything that might have informed Ford and Shaw in their transition into nu-rave vanguards, and it's mostly front-loaded with recent and soon-to-be favorites from the past year or two.
Which makes it, at worst, a likeable contemporary dance mix with flashes of leftfield brilliance. Their tweak of Tomita's 1976 Stravinsky-gone-digital interpretation of the Firebird Suite selection "Infernal Dance of King Kastchei" is a sly intro, and slipping in Metro Area's 2001 classic deep electro-house "Miura" amidst a block of more recent material proves a nice bit of context without jolting listeners out of the block of current hotness they'd spent the previous twenty-plus minutes building up. For the most part, however, the mix stays firmly in 2007-08 turf, and as a symposium on modern house and techno it sounds remarkably cohesive in its diversity. It helps that it's mixed superbly and seamlessly, even as it jumps from the massive rave anthem Serge Santiago mix of Hercules & Love Affair's "Blind" into a glib, arcade-bound acid-house two-fer from Smith N Hack ("Space Warrior") and Discodeine ("Joystick") or fuses Moon Dog's minimalist marimba/glockenspiel composition "Suite Equestria" with Fine Cut Bodies' maximalist house track "Huncut Hacuka".
While it passes the test of a versatile, well-assembled mix-- sounding smooth-flowing as a whole, but varied enough to sound weirdly choppy and jarring if you skip to each successive track after a minute-- FabricLive 41 also has the benefit of boasting two major peaks, one early, one late. The aforementioned "Blind" bleeds its way into the outro of new SMD cut "Simple" (a sharp bit of retro-pop-lock Detroitness), then burbles and crests over seven and a half minutes of epic slow build that firmly anchors down the mix's momentum four tracks in. It's bookended sharply by a manic segue between two mid-90s classics, Plastikman's military drumroll arm-flailer "Spastik" and the insistent panic-attack thump of Green Velvet's "Flash", and the ensuing rattling stampede makes it the ideal climax to a mix that largely builds itself on a indie-friendly revival of predecessors like these. This peak is then awkwardly followed up by the actual set-closer, the Walker Brothers' vaguely Roxy Music-esque 1978 disco bid "Nite Flights", which drags that jittery intensity out into the middle of the street and runs it over with a car (albeit a really sleek-looking Lotus Esprit)-- but that's the risk you take with the nu-rave vanguard, and FabricLive 41's reward-to-risk ratio is high enough to recommend it easily.
