Flight of The Albatross

Flight of The Albatross

Fairmont [Border Community]

20 November, 2007 | 4.24PM

• Written by: Lee Smith
• Filed under: Music Recommendations: fairmont, jake fairley

Toronto native Jake Fairley was churning out excellent rock-tinged minimal techno on labels like Sender for years, before he finally broke with ‘Gazebo/Gazelle’ on James Holden’s Border Community stronghold.

A searing, melodic beast of a track, it helped re-introduce thousands of bleak techno-heads to the joys of tranced-out melodies.

While it might have left a handful of his gnarlier fans cold, it certainly showed that Jake’s flair for pop-inspired grandeur was only matched by his natural instinct for rocking the dancefloor.

Nearly three years on, and the Fairmont album finally arrives, preceded by this fiery little sampler, ‘Flight of The Albatross’.

James Holden gets in a right tizz when people talk about the ‘Border Community sound’ – he believes his label is ‘without category’, like many portentous auteurs – but at the risk of raising his blood pressure, ‘Flight Of The Albatross’ is indeed an archetypal BC release, both in its original form and in its ‘Reef Carribeans’ remix.

The former employs a swung out ‘schaffel’ beat to underpin waves of emotive, melodic flickers, taking its cue from Wolfgang Voigt’s glam-techno experiments and imbuing them with Fairley’s patented melancholic spikiness.

The ‘Reef Carribeans’ remix is a low-slung, drifting affair, with a syncopated, break-ish rhythm, surging bass and sweet harmonies sounding simultaneously classic (think FSOL) and ultra-contemporary (think, erm, Border Community).

Finally, Christ.

And Metope’s remixes provide fractured glitchtronics and churning Amiga-techno, respectively, and are equally worthy of investigation.

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