I'm completing the London leg of my techno tourist holiday and thought
I'd write a little review of my first trip to megaclub Fabric since I
haven't posted any event reviews on this list for many months.
Saturday was megaminimal with luciano headlining supported by Alter
Ego live, Thomas Melchior, and Matt Dear. Thomas Melchior was a bit of
a dissapointment. I find his productions a nice blend of house and
minimal but his live set was too monotonous and flat overall. Alter
Ego was too harsh electroclashy for my tastes. It was baldy (roman
flugel?) on some sort of hardware and the other guy on laptop. Matthew
Dear was playing some pretty hard minimal but the mixing was less than
great with many off mixes.
Luciano came on at 4:30 and I was really impressed with his set. I
missed him at DEMF this year and the last time I caught him playing
was the 2005 DEMF when I was not as into the tracky/minimal techno
sounds.
He started off with a mix of deep house and minimal dropping the
acapella of a Blaze track over some beepy stuff and also a minimal mix
of that big St. Germain downtempo track that I've never heard before
and could be his own mix since he was playing on Serato. He played a
fair amount of detroit music which was surprising to me. Including At
Les which the crowd was really digging. I never considered that a peak
hour song but what do I know. He played a few latin bits including a
nice samba cutup. Other tracks I enjoyed hearing on that booming if
not somewhat distorted system were one of the many mixes of Aardvark's
cult copy, the recent School track by Rob Hood on Music Man, and an
old gemini on relief. After about 3 hours he started tagging with
resident Craig Richards. When I left at 9 they were still playing to a
small dedicated crowd of around 30 people. The mixing was getting a
bit sloppy at that point. In addition to Serato he was using one of
those red sound looping devices occasionally. Some of you may be
disappointed to know that he did not drop Moodymann's Shades of Jae ;)
I'm excited to check out Popkomm this week and then going to check out
that todaysart festival in the hague on Friday. Will write some more
reviews at some point if anyone really cares.
