Crack

Call us pussies, but Crack didn’t spend 30-hours in Fabric for their 12th birthday. We only did 16. Is 16 not enough for ya? When attempting to extract the choice goodness from a 30+ hour party, a bit of planning was made in advance. Rocking up to the club at 2 o’clock on Sunday afternoon was initially a little disconcerting, compounded by the wildly vacant and dishevelled partygoers leaving the venue. At that hour there was clearly a bit of crossover in personnel happening in the club. As bodies limped from the double doors, fresh-faces arrived.

That’s because unless you’re made of sterner stuff than us, a 30-hour continuous party is a pretty fucking mental idea. Feasibly, if you woke up at 10pm and arrived at Fabric at 11pm Saturday (when the night started), for the start of Space Dimension Controller’s opening set, you could probably pull it off. So we missed a bit, but my God the club was still at full tilt when we arrived to the house sounds of Terry Francis playing amiably to a 2pm crowd. If you needed a lift, the long-standing resident was expertly providing the early afternoon sounds with a techy punch for those arriving with their tails in the air to get into the swing of things, as well as providing a pick-up for those soldiering on.

With Room Two and Three shut, you could easily see what the programmers were trying to do with their selection of afternoon/evening music. Lee Foss provided the slightly predictable, but incredibly solid Hot Natured on-trend house bonanza which was probably exactly what the crowd needed, before an incredibly confusing set from Moodymann that veered from beautiful building vocal house to odd unnecessary bits of microphone dialogue and Nirvana? Fair enough, but a mosh-pit wasn’t really the order of the day.

The ante was ramped up slightly with the arrival of Pearson Sound, who continues his climb up the credibility ladder. Knowing the techno monoliths playing after him, his set was a superb compromise between the indefinable dubby techno for which he’s become known, and some much tougher, sterner 4/4. A head-turning booking for the Fabric crowd, he remains one of the very few artists that can effectively straddle Saturday and Friday night bookings. This set showcased a maturity far beyond his years.

And then to the closing highlights. The three-way techno smash between the insanely reliable Craig Richards, arguably the most interesting techno artist on the planet in Ricardo Villalobos, and one of his protégés in Rhadoo. The seven or so hours music provided by Villalobos et al was arguably some of the most intense and enjoyable sounds heard in recent times. So much has been said about Villalobos’s ability to work the insane capability of the Fabric sound system, but it’s true the weird, disjointed, off-kilter techno he peddles with such unique supremacy is wholly brought to life on a system of this scale. Trainspotting some of the tracks (a task in itself) and playing them on even a sound system of decent quality reduces their potency significantly. This is what makes him such an utterly compelling artist – especially in this club. Crack is wired in at a level we haven’t enjoyed in sometime. The whole Main Room surges on every mentally engaging transition.

Windy, loopy, compelling techno and the odd astounding hands-on-head moment means Crack leaves the club at 6am with the dancefloor still ramjam. An incredible spectacle. To think we missed 14 hours. Essential stuff.


- - - - - - - - - -


Words: Hulio Bourgeois

Photo: Beth Marsh