- Few club nights could swallow a Luciano-sized hole in their line-up without breaking a sweat. With big names across all three rooms, including Adam Beyer in room two, an Innervisions takeover of room three, and resident Craig Richards in the main room, London’s Fabric still had as much depth of talent on offer as it does any other weekend on December 15th when they had the Swiss-Chilean minimal superhero cancel on them at the last minute.
I arrived too late to catch Aril Brikha (part of the all-Swedish roster in room two), and so after a little bit of wandering settled in to catch John Keys (Dandy Jack and Andrés Garcia). They played a style not dissimilar to their recent Who’s Afraid of Virginia Tsedong 12-inch: minimal that alternated between lightness and funk, with bright synths and squelchy basslines. Although fresh-sounding, many of the tunes lacked much of a punch, and the sometimes-limpid drumming let down music that could have been easier to dance to than it was. When the tunes tightened up, such as during the version of ‘Torturing Lines’ that they played near the end of their set, there was little not to like, but for long patches they weren’t up to that standard. By the time I left, the main room was as sparsely populated as I’ve ever seen it.
In room three, the story was completely different. Âme, joined for an occasional bit of tag-team by Marcus Worgull, packed the small space. They played tracks, as you might expect, both deep and techy. The overall sound was often a far cry from Âme’s own productions, with nary a trace of big-room house numbers like ‘Balandine’. Instead, their creative mixing saw tunes such as 2000 and One’s ‘Work’ and Carl Craig’s remix of Kevin Saunderson’s ‘Till We Meet Again’ slot in near to one another. The intensity of their set rose considerably as it progressed, with the tech/house divide blurring still further, until the peak saw endlessly building house riffs balanced perfectly beneath slicing and freewheeling techno snares. In short, Âme impressed as much as DJs as they do as producers.
I migrated to room two just as soon as Âme wrapped up. There, Adam Beyer provided a stiff antidote to the German genre-benders, playing no-bullshit techno like Chris Liebing’s ‘Bangpop’. The combination of the long, dark unadorned room, with the system turned up to 11, and Beyer’s unflagging focus had me begging for mercy in the best possible way. He favoured records that featured the bare minimum melodic touch needed to keep atmosphere in the room, but which never strayed beneath that threshold. The result was music subtle enough to give the unsubtle beats all the room they needed to take centre stage without becoming domineering.
Once past his advertised finishing time, Beyer changed up the formula a bit and played a few tunes outside the mold of the rest of his set. Danton Eeprom’s ‘All I Can Say’ made a welcome appearance, but Beyer diverged still further from his previous style into overzealously experimental territory, and I left to see Craig Richards wrap the night up with more techno in the main room.
Richards started with the enjoyably disjointed (Petre Inspirescu’s ‘Sakadat’) before progressing to the downright mad, like Ricardo Villalobos’ inimitable ‘Andruic’, in which the cacophony of organic drums came across gloriously on the system for which they were perhaps designed. By about the seven o’clock mark, Richards’ set progressed to stomping, sharp-fanged stuff that gave a noticeable second wind to the increasingly ragged dancefloor. When I peeked across the top of the decks I noticed classic bangers by Klute and Telex joining the huge number of gems that Richards mined from his seemingly bottomless record bag.
I can’t remember ever dancing as energetically at such a late hour as I did then. By the end of the night, it felt like Luciano’s absence simply meant that the DJs had to dig just as deep as the clubbers, with stellar results.