- It can’t be easy, being mnml in 2008. Most of the people who were minimal because it was fashionable were ‘never minimal’ not long into last year. And the backlash against Minus, the label at the center of both the good and bad aspects of the genre, was well deserved—a slew of distinctly mediocre releases on the imprint drowned out the pearls of quality that still appeared in 2007. Richie Hawtin even lost his bangs.
But if the mnml bubble has long since burst, no one told the barbarian hordes that descended on Fabric Saturday, March 22nd. The queue at the famed club stretched at least halfway down to Farringdon tube station, about twice as long as I’ve seen it ever before. (With almost all the Minus heavyweights in attendance, joined by Adam Beyer and Craig Richards for good measure, it wasn’t hard to see why.) All this spelled chaos on the door: the guestlist queue took ninety minutes and the paying queue was rumoured to demand at least four hours. Once in, things didn’t get better straight away.
Magda and Troy Pierce playing at the same time in different rooms provided a good picture of the opposite ends of the Minus sound today. Pierce was in full-on weird mode, filling room three with the kinds of sounds that make people say that minimal is only good if, yes, you’re in a K hole. At Fabric the noise coming from his decks featured what sounded like bottles being clinked together amplified to deafening decibels. Such milder additions to the programme as ‘Oxytocin’ didn’t do enough to make the music palatable for the setting. For the dancefloor to be half-full when everywhere else in the club was shoulder-to-shoulder, Pierce must have been doing something wrong.
Magda, on the other hand, was all lightness and showed off a skill that placed every beat in just the right place to elicit a bit of movement. She showed how minimal, like no other music, can combine with chemical enhancement, lack of sleep or just enthusiasm for dancing to create an experience of being perfectly locked in sync with the beats. “Melodic but thumping”, was one man’s concise description—the high spirits of the crowd certainly made it seem like she must have hit every note earlier. By her third hour, though, things began to fall apart. Beats began to fall out of sync, the selection began to feel directionless and Magda held too long for undeserved applause. As much as I like her, there was no denying that by the time I caught up with Magda she was running out of steam.
Gaiser, next in the main room, was better. He played a superb live hour drawing from the material on Eye Contact, as well as unreleased tunes. The tone of the music was silky smooth and, dare I say it, a bit deep. The polish of the production never wavered, nor did the set begin to feel monotonous in the way that live sets all too often do. Instead, the drops came so well that it was as though he were on turntables, never getting lost in the intricacies of cueing. The sparse bells and bleeps against a richly detailed base of low frequencies—look no further than ‘Withdrawal’ to hear what I mean—showed the other side of what minimal can do. The sparsity of Gaiser’s music was more about enhancing what was there rather than locking us in the groove: he played the minimal of “just enough and no more” rather than the minimal of “less than is needed”. ‘Mute’, towards the end, was one of the highlights of the night.
Next came daddy Hawtin, and he wasted no time in showing just how different what he does is from what his Minus children do. The first hour was classic Richie: unemotional, but irresistible tunes that dipped and weaved unpredictably and included bass more as a condiment than an entrée. Progressing into the second and third hours, his set began to take on weight. Bass began arriving in a steady flow instead of now and again, with a wink. After the first hour Hawtin fell into a steady pattern of slowly including more and more tracks with an afterhours feel before tightening up and playing it straight for short periods. This gave the set a clear structure, but perhaps at the cost of prohibiting the floor from settling into the steady groove of either type of material. Unfortunately, the effect was a little more like drowsiness than the intended hypnoticism, which was weird, given how much energy was conveyed by the mixing.
What mixing it was, though. Anyone who has heard a Hawtin set knows just how good Minus’ fearless leader is at using effects, layering, and employing a million other little tricks to create high art. Amazingly, his technical virtuosity at Fabric reached whole new heights, owing to the greater capabilities of a new, turntable-free setup. Between his two laptops and controller, Hawtin seemed to deconstruct tracks at will and rearrange them into something new. This is something that many aspire to, but few ever pull off completely. What’s more, Hawtin also seems to find room to add the odd unexpected sound to the mix and take it out just as quickly in what seems like a sly nod, or even an in-joke.
By the time Hawtin’s set dragged towards the end of its five hours, though, it was unclear whether his mixing skill was put to universally good use. Some house started arriving at this point—even things as unexpected as Villalobos’ ‘Enfants’—but it seemed at some points that we were at a talent show rather than a concert. Maybe Hawtin will work out the kinks and use his new setup to deliver otherworldly performances, but by the time I stumbled out well into Easter Sunday it seemed like he had given something very good, but had never quite turned it up to eleven. I blame the hype around Minus, and their ten weeks of silence especially, for creating the expectation that those of us who made it down to Fabric were in for something 110% as good as anything else around. (That same hype is to blame for leaving the club too choc-a-bloc to allow much dancing.)
It seems that the Minus crew are the same this year as ever. They have a lot to offer, but getting to it still takes wading through too much bullshit. For this reason, even though Minus definitely have some good material on the horizon, Easter Sunday felt more like a retrospective than a resurrection.
