Fabric 27

by Andy KellmanMatthew Dear's mix for the Fabric series is an intensely linear set of buoyant-yet-airtight beats and goofy-but-stern accents. Its full effect will be lost on a sound system or set of headphones that is less than state of the art. Dear clearly put a lot of time into making this, having melded elements from up to three separate tracks at a time to make new tracks (albeit in a less reconstructive manner than Richie Hawtin's DE9: Transitions), but the result is a mix so straightforward in direction and similar in tempo that its features will coagulate during a listening experience that is anything less than completely concentrated. Even the tracks that should stand out -- the Tobi Neumann remix of Robag Wruhme's "Wortkabular," Âme's "Rej," the Jon Gaiser remix of Billy Dalessandro's "Come with Me" -- become sunk in the flow. The presence of Robert Babicz's "Battlestar," however, is a major exception and the only instance of a diversion from the potentially suffocating current -- it's distinct and bulky enough to resemble a bounding street sweeper amid a flurry of low-profile sports cars. Unless you're a devout follower of labels like Treibstoff, Raum, and Dumb-Unit, and find yourself gravitating toward anything that is neither bleak nor euphoric in tone, you'd be better served by mixes that take more colorful and unexpected turns, such as Luciano's Sci.Fi.Hi.Fi, Sascha Funke's Boogybytes, or M.A.N.D.Y.'s Get Physical, Vol. 2. If you're simply drawn to Dear, you might find that most of his selections here are neither as adventurous nor as delightfully batty as his own best productions. (Five of his Audion tracks do appear on this mix in one form or another.) And if you've been a subscriber to the Fabric series for two years, you might find that this mix sounds like a fresh update of Fabric 15's first half.