- Unusually for a house and techno night at Fabric, the Saturday before Halloween was very long on homegrown talent. Locals Radio Slave and Damian Lazarus were set to face off against Gui Boratto, the Brazilian who represented the only foreigner amongst the headliners. Hoping that the UK would represent itself well, I arrived at half eleven to find the club filling nicely.
What I saw of James Mowbray’s warm-up set in the main room impressed very much. Mowbray's set had a tech house feel in the vein of his 'Lost in the Tropics' 12". There were no misplaced beats, and by the time he cleared the decks at 1 a.m. the crowded main room was dancing very busily. Room two was similarly excellent all night long, with slightly harder house and techno provided by Terry Francis, Ben Sims and Steve Rachmad; Rachmad's tune ‘Moog on Acid’, which I never mind hearing, was representative of the down-to-business atmosphere. Room three wasn’t really my cup of tea with electro, breaks and a dose of commercial dance, but when I wandered in Rob Da Bank was keeping plenty of people in high spirits with Justice v. Simian’s ‘We Are Your Friends’.
Radio Slave was on quite early in the main room, starting with a one and a half hour set before reappearing a few hours later to play back to back with Damian Lazarus. He didn’t diverge much from his trademark style, featuring dark and meandering techno long-players with a hint of menace and a solid bite. Much of his set was made up of his own tunes, including his remixes of Tiefschwarz’s ‘Ghostrack’, and Len Faki’s ‘My Black Sheep’, the latter being probably my current favourite, a mean spirited room wrecker to compete with the best of them. Also very notable was Ricardo Villalobos’ ‘Violetta’, which combines a driving kick with rattling drums and a lush horn that sounds more out of American jazz than techno.
Later in the night when I caught up with Radio Slave, ever so briefly, in the smoking area, he mentioned a desire to incorporate elements of classical music into his production. His current style reflects this, with plenty of interweaving instrumentation and slowly building melody working to create a symphonic effect, but also to an extent leaves behind the trancey grandeur of some earlier tunes, for instance his remix of Trenemoller’s ‘Moan’. I thought this went down pretty well at this comparatively early hour, my only regret being that one of dance music’s best and most distinctive producers wasn’t given more room to stretch his legs.
Gui Boratto lightened the tone considerably with an hour long live set. Early on he played quite a few tunes in an electro/techno style, for example his remix of Robert Babicz’s ‘Sin’, while later he moved more towards an uplifting sound, with warm house tones filtering in more and more steadily. It was very much in line with Boratto's tendency to flirt with cheesiness whilst avoiding ever sealing the deal, a quality I do enjoy and which is rarely pulled off as well as he does. An extended version of this summer’s Ibiza smash ‘Beautiful Life’ was the finale, and it showed that an irresistibly pretty melody can still bring the house down no matter how many humourless minimal tunes tap into our dance floor consciousness these days.
Damian Lazarus kept things rolling superbly with a more eclectic set that often combined suave house tones with insistent beats, such as Cassy’s brilliantly executed mix of Swayzak’s ‘Smile and Receive’, which I recognised. Things really took flight though when Radio Slave joined him at five for a mixing exhibition that showed no interest in winding the night down, storming strongly towards the seven o’clock mark with another Radio Slave tune, the conniption inducing ‘Dedication’, providing the peak, before the two ended by dipping into the weirder and wilder ends of their record bags for a whole host of things that I imagine were mostly unreleased and unlikely to grace my ears again. They carried this on well past the advertised closing time, providing a genuine treat to those of us who straggled on into morning.