When London’s Fabric nightclub announced they were ending both their Fabric and Fabriclive mix series, they went out with a bang. Fabric 100 was a massive three-disc set from longtime residents Craig Richards and Terry Francis along with club cofounder Keith Reilly; Fabriclive100 was a tag-team effort from Kode9 and the ever-elusive Burial. The two sets signaled the end of an era. Perhaps, some ventured, they were tombstones for the mix CD itself. Yet, six months later, here we are with a new iteration of Fabric’s series, kicking off with Fabric Presents Bonobo.
In tapping Bonobo (aka Simon Green, a British-born, L.A.-based producer), Fabric the brand seeks to escape the fetters of Fabric the club. While Green has been a known quantity in electronic music circles since the turn of the 21st century, moving from trip-hop into world-music-flavored productions and the UK charts, he had only DJed at the club once, in October of last year. Popular on the festival circuit, he’s known more for his live sets than his skill behind the decks.
Bonobo’s most evocative work tugs at the heartstrings rather than the feet; his melodies and live instrumentation hint at a fondness for jazz, soul, folk, and minimalism. All of those were featured to sterling effect on Bonobo’s Late Night Tales mix a few years back. Fabric Presents doesn’t exactly play to those strengths; instead, he’s in upbeat house mode.
He’s on sure footing with the mix’s opening, which consists of two of his own tracks. Flecks of strings, saxophone, and woodwinds weave through the kick drums, evoking Bonobo’s warmest productions. That sensibility runs deep in these selections, be it the dramatic strings of Poté’s “Jacquot” or the bamboo flute tones of Alex Kassian’s “Hidden Tropics.”
Those two funnel into a curious and rather abrupt early peak with Âme’s 2004 house track “Nia,” which throws the mix into a lurch, losing momentum as Green breaks it all down and figures out another direction. Most of the set draws from recent, unreleased tracks, but it’s when he mixes in older material (the glitchy jazz of Nepa Allstar’s “The Way,” the dreamy ambient techno of John Beltran’s “Collage of Dreams”) that he strikes the right balance. It’s telling that both of those selections use just a handful of elements to make their point.
“Often I end up adding a bunch more elements to the track after I originally thought it was done,” Green confessed to Interview in 2013, and that lack of self-editing also tends to color his choices here. Too many overstuffed, heavy-handed picks—like Dark Sky & Afriquoi’s “Cold Harbour,” with its vocoder, thumb piano, acid bass, polyrhythmic percussion, and twanging strings—start to bog things down. The middle of the set is particularly wince-inducing, from the sappy sentiment of Will Saul’s echoing vocal (“I build my whole world around you”) to Dan Kye’s falsetto R&B and Titeknots’ heaving strings. The cumulative effect is as sappy as a maple tree.
In choosing an outside-the-box artist like Bonobo to launch Fabric Presents, there’s an implication that this next iteration of the series will look beyond the club’s walls for inspiration. In this case, though, Bonobo has ended up slotting right back into Fabric’s dancefloor-centric mold. Going forward, the series might be more interesting if artists take the opportunity to step outside the strictures of the club.
