FABRICLIVE 66: Daniel Avery

Album review

The Daniel Avery timeline has little space between "dance music epiphany" and "first commercial mix." The DJ/producer surfaced with a Little Boots remix in 2009 and crammed a decade's worth of activity into 2010-2012. In 2011, while he was operating as Stopmakingme, Avery gained an evangelist in Andrew Weatherall, who proclaimed that his own club sets were filled with the youngster's productions. In 2012, Erol Alkan's Phantasy Sound label released several Avery productions, some of which appear on Fabriclive 66. One of the most up-to-date mixes in either Fabric series, all but five of its 23 tracks date from 2012. The dizzy Prins Thomas mix of Telephones' "Kanal" and Compuphonic's sweet closer "Sequoia," both of which were released at the end of 2010, are the oldest inclusions. Through and through, this a club set, condensed into 76 slamming and smacking minutes, and it glowingly reflects Avery's approach: blur the lines between techno, house, and electro, and keep it immediate and weird. Tracks from the jacking Nautiluss and the rattling Sneaker (whose handclaps are distorted into firecracker-like FX) surround Avery's slippery, burbling "Naïve Reception," an industrial descendent of Yaz's "Situation." Around the half-hour mark, the Magnets' "Game Theory" fades into near silence and gives way to a repeated announcement ("Noise flies high"), and then the mix kicks into high gear with "Water Jump," one of Avery's meatiest tracks. Avery then stitches a diverse high-energy succession of tracks from veterans -- including Raudive, Miss Kittin, and Kassem Mosse -- as well as relative newcomers. Weatherall himself appears with Timothy J. Fairplay as the Asphodells, whose wobbly "Dry Heat" is the penultimate track.
© Andy Kellman /TiVo