Pitchfork

Audion doesn't quite have the brand name appeal of the Matthew Dear stuff, which crossed over to indie kids on the back of Dear's wet, fey vocals and the hiccoughing funny noises that pass for hooks in the world of microhouse. This is probably why the marquee for Fabric 27 is so unwieldy. Anyone expecting the hummable end of the Dear-ly spectrum will be disappointed as Fabric 27 is neither happy nor sad, angry nor euphoric, ugly nor pretty. Fabric 27 is baldly functional in a way that makes you question what that function is, at least when removed from the club and reformatted for the living room, the iPod, whatever.

Techno has been pumping out music that could be derided as pointless off the floor since it was first declared passe in the early 1990s. The difference is that the marketing of techno has shifted from, well, not being marketed at all to being written up in places like, say, I dunno, Pitchfork. The slick packaging and widespread dissemination of the Fabric series is designed to appeal to people outside the techno cognoscenti. Some Fabric mixes-- Michael Mayer's springs immediately to mind-- are guaranteed to find a wide-ranging audience with their equally wide-ranging track selection, shifts in tempo, and petty indulgences like hooks and vocals and overt melodies.

I'm sure heard on a club soundsystem, with sub-bass rearranging your body chemistry, Fabric 27 would work. (An hour plus isn't really enough time for hypnosis to take control.) It's itching, rippling minimalist muzak, beats bobbing in a lagoon of bass mucous. If you're not listening very closely, the tracks will slink by unnoticed, transitioning from one burbling minimal workout to the next. Like the Ivan Smagghe Fabric mix from 2005, Dear's mix will be embraced by people who think looking for possible variations in a seemingly unceasing, unchanging matte black bottom end the most enthralling thing in the world. Everyone else will just hear a same-y techno mix.

Maybe the fault lies in Dear cutting up two or three tracks into a new whole. This is what DJs have been doing since disco, and as long as Jeff Mills is still alive I wouldn't write it off in a techno context. But Mills' multi-turntable hacking has a fury and drive utterly lacking in what I'll be succinct and call the post-Ableton/Hawtin era. Instead of butt-bumping chops and delirious edits with the frayed edges still visible, you get three minimal techno tracks that sound like...a single minimal techno track. This smooth, toothless mixing may be technically impressive but it's also pretty boring.

Techno purists are probably grimacing at the mere mention of "functional" as a pejorative. Maybe instead of your beanbag chair or on the stairmaster, you need to listen to it on the highway wreathed in fog at 5 a.m. Some old techno sawhorses still hold, I guess.