- After the four-hour queues and sardine-tin pandemonium of last week's Minus party, the relative calm of tonight's crowd was a welcome surprise. Not that Fabric was empty—far from it—but we waltzed in on the guest list without delay at midnight, and the regular line appeared to be moving at a steady crawl. Booking Villalobos was a canny move on Fabric's part – they needed a big draw-card to follow the three-room Minus birthday bonanza, and Villalobos surely remains their most bankable artist. On paper the remainder of the bill left something to be desired, at least to my tastes, but at least it promised a degree of diversity.
But not immediately. We walked in to the closing rounds of Dyed Soundorom in Room 1, whose lumpen tech-house provided little more than thumping low-end to my acclimatising ears, and a wander into Room 2 to hear Terry Francis offered little variety, although the floor was more active. No one I asked knew, or cared, who was playing, but they were clearly enjoying themselves. Time revealed finer details in rhythmic clicks and clipped synth tones, and the few tracks I heard segued excitedly, but we needed beer.
By now Akiko Kiyama had taken the stage of Room 1 and was punching out clean, precise rhythms from her laptop. Her music was highly streamlined and almost emptied of dynamics, with the brief melodic fragments of tracks like 'Gabriel' or 'Isotope' sharpened against raw, ceaseless percussion. One sequence featured a simplistic bassline, unerringly repeated, bleed through what seemed like several tracks, but Kiyama would shift direction and lose elements at crucial moments. Like almost all laptop performances Kiyama had no showbiz spark to speak of, but there was something undeniably seductive about seeing a petite Japanese woman create music of such dogged single-mindedness. This was all the more refreshing when noticing that her audience was so overwhelmingly male.
Indeed, looking into the crowd from the balcony I heard one disgruntled man refer to it as a "sea of dick," and you couldn't disagree. Room 2 was even more oppressive, with menacing, club-footed electro threatening to grope you before reaching the floor. But smoking proved me wrong – cattle pens and heating umbrellas offer definite non-gendered space.
As is so often the case, Room 3 provided the most fun of the evening, with the exposed brick, metal gangways and dark crevices evoking a poky hole-in-the-wall, far removed from the Clerkenwell industrial reality. Residents from the Dutch Clone label had—perhaps momentarily—discarded their bleak militancy in favour of unabashed crowd-pleasers, with I-f delivering a cheeky selection of mutant disco, thick synthetic strings wrapped around dark electro rhythms and spitting drums. An extended and souped-up version of Abba's 'Gimme Gimme Gimme a Man After Midnight' may have had minimal purists quaking but the rest of us boys—and girls!—were shaking like it was Studio 54. It can't go on like this, but for a while it was heaven.
Craig Richards's set was far from the treadmill criticised on by some readers, with dark and reverberant dub-influenced tracks ebbing and flowing like molasses. After I-f's syrup and Kiyama's prickle, Richards offered a welcome degree of emotion, albeit a portentous one, which seemed to accurately capture, and alter, the mood of the room. However, with sets lasting several hours here every week, he has no excuse to deliver anything less.
Headliner Ricardo Villalobos had the whole club whooping and hollering before hitting the decks, and his opening moments were immediately gripping, lively and... faster than all that came before. But this was no race, and for the next few hours Villalobos seemed content to concentrate on playing one of the most enjoyable, satisfying and house-driven sets from him I'd heard. Nothing was left to fester and grow tedious, nor were pieces piled onto become a dizzying miasma of confusing spectacle. The emphasis seemed to be on joyous pep and bounce, like a Thomas Melchior track, with elements and tracks expertly chosen for sonic delight, with audience satisfaction paramount. This was incredibly groovy, and approachable.
As his long set wore on I lapsed into one of those blissed-out reveries, and have no idea what he played, but I wasn't alone. Before leaving I chatted to a charming Chilean couple who were surprised I knew anything about Villalobos and Chilean techno, and they spoke of dancing on beaches with Luciano, Dinky and Villalobos back home. They invited me down to meet him, but I had to get going – it wasn't me on those beaches, and I don't speak Spanish.