London club review: Ricardo Villalobos at Fabric

London club review: Ricardo Villalobos at Fabric

17 July, 2008 | 12.29AM

• Section: Music News Topics: Beatport Blog
• Written by: Ryan Keeling

For those of you unfamiliar with Fabric I’ll give it to you in a sentence: The elite of the world’s house and techno DJs, playing on one of the planet’s finest soundsystems, in the heart of the city of London.

Tonight’s line-up was towered over by superstar DJ (in today’s sense of the term) and bi-monthly resident Ricardo Villalobos.

Also attending the main room fiesta was weekly resident and all-round hero to the locals Craig Richards, along with talented Spectral youngster Seth Troxler.

A good indication of a well conceived line-up at Fabric is usually a full-bodied queue, which is what we were met with upon arrival.

After carefully selecting a beverage we shimmied into Room Two for a bit of Dirtybird action.

I am of course referring to Claude Von Stroke’s record label and not just some overly promiscuous English girl.

Justin Martin was contributing nicely to the “producer vs DJ argument” with the usually deep house production whiz playing a rough-and-tumble selection of tech-house and gnarly minimal.

It is a strange situation these days - that one could only hope to become a widely acclaimed DJ through their productions - but more often than not when you go to see a DJ off the back of their releases their style varies wildly from what you would expect to hear (I’m not suggesting this is a good or a bad thing, merely making an observation, readers.)

Anyway, Room One was warming up nicely by this point.

Seth Troxler was on and playing a varied selection of music that would just about fall under the umbrella of house music.

I have to admit that after visiting Fabric for over five years I still relish the prospect of hearing Craig Richards beat the Room One sound system into submission.

He followed Seth Troxler with a set that probably differed greatly from last week’s set at the club and it will probably be completely different from what he plays the following week, which is indeed a skill in itself.

The main point of criticism levelled at Fabric in recent years has been with regards to the disparate crowd it attracts.

Whilst everything else about the club is top drawer, the main room especially never feels like the dancers within are pulling in quite the same direction.

This point was illustrated perfectly as Villalobos started his set with swarms of over-enthusiastic ravers barging through the bodies and repeatedly shouting his name as loudly as they could (I don’t reckon he had forgotten what it was, fellas).

Their excitement, in fairness, was probably justified as the Chilean launched into the part of his set that should be labelled ‘groovy as fuck’.

Yann Solo‘s ‘Boderline’ typified the first hour with it’s wiggly, rhythmical stylings and infectious bass tone.

Other musical highlights were offered by Daniel Stefanik‘s remix of Greg Tresher’s ‘Break New Soil’, Andomat & Sven U.K.’s ‘O Tempora’ and a tasty little white label from Berlin the kids are simply calling ‘Wax 001’.

Into the early hours of the morning the grooves became incessantly harsher and more direct.

The magic of Villalobos is that amongst the chaos he will always endeavour to do something a bit different.

It’s a trick he doesn’t always pull off and the ten minute jazz-infested, trumpet noodle, on this occasion, had people looking somewhat dazed and confused.

It was probably somewhere around this point we decided that a glass of vodka and the comfort of a home were in order.

In summary if you are ever in London Fabric is, without doubt, a must.

This isn’t the place to go and make new rave buddies and gaze around lovingly at the beaming, euphoria-filled faces.

But if you want a healthy dose of the best underground electronic music on the planet then you could certainly do much, much worse. 

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