The fabric of timelessness

Swayzak are refreshingly out of time. Not in the physical sense, but in the way that their music charmingly fails to have any bearing on musical trends.

In the late ’90s, long before the current fascination with stripped-down, minimal house, James Taylor and David ‘Broon’ Brown were making emotive, dub-fuelled dance floor tracks.

Prior to that, the duo had experimented with electro, but typically managed to miss out on last year’s electroclash explosion. In fact, Swayzak finally released an album’s worth of dance floor electro just as the hype had died down.

Ironically, as the DJ mix CD threatens to drown itself in a sea of technology assisted predictability - how many mixes aren’t put together these days by Logic, Ableton or some other foolproof method? – Swayzak have put together a typically rough, raw and unusual selection for London club Fabric’s label.

‘Fabric 11’ veers from the deep, dubby tones of tracks from Konrad Black and Akufen to Herbert’s minimal house mix of crooner Louie Austen’s ‘Hoping’, before paying homage to the early 90s dub-reggae of Rockers Hi Fi’s classic ‘Push Push’ and ending up pillaging from the edgy punk-funk sound of LCD Soundsystem’s classic ‘Losing My Edge’ and DFA’s mix of Metro Area’s ‘Orange Alert’.

Although Swayzak’s Broon admits that licensing problems meant they couldn’t include a few tracks on the CD – most notably a recent remix by Alter Ego of Human League’s ‘All I Ever Wanted’ - like Coldcut’s classic Journeys By DJs mix, it nonetheless has an enviable track listing, forsaking seamless, anonymous grooves for inspired programming.

“As you can probably tell, I don’t like DJing in big rooms,” Broon explains. “This CD is for listening to at home, but when I play a club, I prefer an intimate space where you can play what you want. This CD is exactly the way we DJ, we believe that clubbers can handle different styles of music. We’re not super technical DJs, playing the most upfront, slamming techno or house. Some clubbers just want to hear drug music and that’s not what we’re about.”

The fact that Swayzak have been around for nearly a decade means that they’re cynical about DJ culture and the narrow musical vision most spinners suffer from.

“Just because you have two records that you can mix well together doesn’t mean that you’re a good DJ,” Broon warns. “There are loads of DJs who put out this faceless, soulless music that’s great to mix with. What’s the point? These are the same people who have forgotten that it’s also a DJ’s job to entertain.”

Swayzak have certainly provided entertainment throughout their career. Apart from this new mix CD, they’ve explored dubby house and deep techno on releases like ‘Snowboarding In Argentina’ and ‘Himawari’ and, more recently on the poppy, electro ‘Dirty Dancing’ album.

Currently taking a production break until September, when they begin work on their new album, Fabric 11 follows the same unpredictable, wayward approach as their productions and is a worthy stopgap for Swayzak fans.

It’s in Germany, where Swayzak’s work is revered, that the duo gets most of their production and DJing work. Indeed, the next few months sees Swayzak remix three German artists – Richard Davis, Senor Coconut and Bergheim 34.

“We play all over France and Spain, but Germany is the place that picked up on our music and it’s also the first place outside of the UK where we played,” Broon relates. “As far as I’m concerned, the Germans have a better understanding of electronic music than most places. It sounds like a cliché, but they take running their labels, their clubs and their music very seriously and I buy and source all my new music there. Even the really big German DJs like Sven Vath play a wide range of material and, guess what, it works,” he concludes. Just like ‘Fabric 11’ then.