Dance-music evolution has taken to small steps of late, such that new ideas and changing tides announce themselves through miniscule changes that are hard to recognize without a lot of spare time and a compulsive devotion to the mechanics of rhythm and sound design. One overarching strain is easy to observe, however: the interplay between big and small, both in terms of beats and the stages they play out on. Where the past few years have been marked by disparate poles of clicks-'n'-cuts minimalism and ballooning trance, the story of now is how those two moments have drifted toward a magnetic center.
Superstar DJ John Digweed made his name at the bigger end of the spectrum, spinning and producing monolithic trance that favored broad strokes over bristly details. It was the kind of approach that packed big clubs and rushed up sales charts, but elicited almost no attention from people who think and write about dance music as something more than a simple social catalyst. Digweed engages that part of the dance contingent more than he has in ages with Fabric 20, an agile mix-disc that pulls trendy threads into a tight knot. Pete Moss' "Strive To Live" starts off with a pitch-shifted cry to "make it better," laying the vocal over a colorful swirl of electronics and a subtle beat buried down low. The club pulse kicks in behind Adam Johnson's "Traber," a banger whose beat emphasizes a heavy kick and the spray of sleek accents scaled to minimal size. Such intricacy has always figured in Digweed's sound, but here, he's quicker to set them in the foreground and let the mysterious properties of "swing" play out around him.
He's craftier in his mixing, too: The track list fans out to include vintage-sounding electro-disco (DJ Rasoul), stomping off-time techno (Bobby Peru), and weird, noisy house (Angel Alanis' nicely titled "Knob Job"). A telling passage comes late in the disc, when Digweed makes an underground grab at Michael Mayer's terrific remix of Superpitcher's "Happiness": After warping and wavering through grey-scale moods, the track implodes and reduces to nothing but a gritty oscillator wave taking a free-frequency stroll. There's almost no sound at its nadir, but the rising effect proves as big and stirring as anything Digweed has delivered in the past.