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Fabric 77

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  • Fabric

Techno auteur and Berghain veteran Marcel Dettmann's first mix CD in three years is almost Escherian in the way it folds four-to-the-floor beats into a series of improbable twists and turns that nevertheless seem, somehow, to unroll eternally in a straight line. 15 out of 19 cuts bear his fingerprints, either as producer or A&R.

Let us now hail the horizontal axis. As electronic dance music has increased in mainstream popularity, the dominant force has been vertical: the drop, the fist-pump, the collective leap in the air, the upstretched finger, the meteoric rise of the superstars themselves. DJ sets play out like roller coasters, a succinct succession of tension-building ascents and sudden, precipitous plunges.

But not all dance music works like this. Techno, for instance, typically has placed far more emphasis on the horizontal plane, with long, gradual crossfades lending the illusion of a seamless and endless continuity, and extreme repetition furthering a sense of stasis-in-movement. That's particularly true of the kind of techno associated with Berlin's Berghain club, and it's even truer of Marcel Dettmann, one of Berghain's best-known residents. His productions and his DJ sets alike are less like a rollercoaster than a landscape of gently rolling foothills; less like an elevator than a moving walkway with a barely perceptible rise. His Fabric 77, his first mix CD since 2011's Conducted, is almost Escherian in the way it folds four-to-the-floor beats into a series of improbable twists and turns that nevertheless seem, somehow, to unroll eternally in a straight line. Are we floating in space, or marching in place?

Like a growing number of DJs who have used their respective Fabric mixes to showcase their own music—Ricardo Villalobos, Omar S, Shackleton, Guy Gerber—Dettmann devotes the bulk of his set either to his own productions or tracks he's released to his MDR label. (The majority of the latter he describes as "unreleased demos"—that is, cuts submitted to the label that he's been playing out for a while now, as long as three years, in the case of Rod's "RSPCT"—and while they are all slated for eventual release, they make Fabric 77 a goldmine for Dettmann trainspotters curious about the composition of his current club sets.) That 15 out of 19 cuts bear his fingerprints, either as producer or A&R, underscores the extent to which DJing, for Dettmann, is a means to the creation of a kind of totalizing aesthetic; it's DJing as gesamtkunstwerk.

There might be a temptation to describe that aesthetic as "minimal," but it's too roughly textured for that, evoking splintered wood, charcoal lumps, mud puddles in a rutted road. Arte Povera would be a more accurate reference point for both the mix's rough-hewn analog sounds (chalky hi-hats, tarnished oil drums, paper-bag rustle) and its function-first sense of structure, which is only as elaborate as a line of paving stones or a loom for weaving burlap. The artists responsible for the tracks selected for the mix include Terence Fixmer, Answer Code Request, Dario Zenker, Norman Nodge, Joey Anderson, Carl Craig's Paperclip People, and quite a few producers with a fairly low profile so far—FBK, François X, Lockertmatik, Marcelus, Wincent Kunth. I hesitate to go into much detail about individual tracks, however, because music like this resists description, and the very point of the mix is how the component parts function as a composite whole.

There's nothing like immediate gratification to be found in this hardscrabble landscape, but there are plenty of highlights that attest to Dettmann's mastery of detail threaded through its loosely-woven zone-out. Midway through Rod's "RSPCT", the beat drops out and leaves only a syncopated foghorn bleat, pealing like Teflon tympani, its dotted eighth-note rhythm briefly offering a countervailing pulse before the downbeat comes stumbling back in. There are the looped chants of Nodge's "BB 1.0", which I somehow missed the first dozen times I listened to the mix. In Dettmann's "Lightworks (Ø [Phase] Remix)", there's a glassy woodblock (or is that woody glass brick?) pattern so quietly insistent that you begin to wonder if it's been running through the mix from the every beginning, without notice. Then, by the time you finish that thought, it's gone. Between Answer Code Request's "Transit 0.2" and Dario Zenker's "Nearlin", we're treated to what might be the call and response of two mating woodpeckers, set against a dusky backdrop of swirling dust and seductive gloom.

But even fans of patient, hypnotic, ultra-reduced techno may find Fabric 77 too subtle for its own good. Or perhaps it's just too uniform? His 2011 mix for the Music Man label, Conducted, had more readily apparent character, veering from the lush Detroitisms of Reel by Real's "Sundog" through the paranoid pinball wizardry of the Analogue Cops' "Why You Love Me" and on through the gothed-out clang of Morphosis "Too Far"; Conducted covered plenty of ground, but here, the cuts are so similar in tone and intensity that one wonders if the mix would sound any different if he re-recorded the set according to an arbitrary reshuffling of the sequence.

Nevertheless, as a journey that's not quite a journey, this can take you far outside yourself. Throughout, Dettmann's use of shape and texture makes me think of little clumps of lichen clinging to darkly lustrous sheets of slate; it's a fitting metaphor for a mix that proceeds like a long hike along a mountain ridge, far above the tree line, watching over a world that peels away below. In a musical landscape littered with drops, there's a relief in four-to-the-floor beats like these never quite seem to touch the ground.

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