Fabric Various Artists

Wong Hok-yeung opens the Hong Kong Composers Guild s RESONATING COLOURS 5 with Night Poem, a composition for cello and piano. Rhapsodic and ambling, the piece conjures nightly thoughts, welling up and vanishing with lifelike authenticity. Chan Chin-ting brings two pieces for solo violin: Cross Currents, an exploration of the violin's full tonal range, and Postcards, an assortment of "six miniatures/musical gifts," which can be played as standalone pieces, but also feature a common theme that unites them. Lee Kar-tai's Pyrus Flower in the Rain is a minimalist evocation of temporality.

The six works featured here are a selection of Agostino Di Scipio’s music for strings and live electronics. Their textural materials emerge from a carefully designed encounter (or clash?) between different technologies – from the mechanics of traditional lutherie to real-time computer processing, or analogue devices of different sorts (microphones and speakers arranged in well-studied spatial and functional relationships to the instruments and to the performance space). Di Scipio explores extended instrumental techniques – both familiar and specially-researched ones – to capture the tactile energy of tiny gestures and their powder-like sonic residues. Yet, for him, instruments are not just there to create sounds; they can also exert control over the computer transformation of those sounds, so that the player’s gesture ultimately influences or even drives the digital processing operations.

From playing acid house at the legendary Haçienda to residencies at a number of the world’s super clubs and a grammy nomination, Sasha's career trajectory is pretty much unparalleled. His contribution to electronic music in the 90s is synonymous with the rise of progressive house. As a producer, his vast discography includes a number of studio albums, remixes for Madonna and The Chemical Brothers and soundtracks for computer games, whilst a long list of acclaimed mixes are heralded by many as some of the greatest of all time.

Fabriclive 71 is DJ EZ's installment in Fabric Records' FabricLive series, #71 in the series of serieses. This is a diverse selection of electronic dance music for the ages, including a few that was/is his muses.

Fabric 94 is the 2017 compilation mix album by house/techno DJ Steffie Doms, who simply goes by the name Steffi. She mixes a number of different elements, a few of which are of her own doing. This came out on Fabric.

"fabric is easily one of my favourite clubs in the world and favourite CD series. I wanted to be my organic self and fit as much of the music I love into a modest 80 minutes. That required a bit of digging and mashing up of sounds, but I knew it would be doing the series a great disservice to take the task lightly." Maceo Plex

Ushering in an exciting new era for the label, nightclub and mix series, Bonobo opens the 'fabric presents' series that pledges CD, digital, and vinyl releases on a quarterly basis. His highly textural aesthetic translates into an ethos that looks to introduce a more open musical palette without losing sight of its past. His mix supports 10 exclusives or unreleased tracks, including 2 from himself and another from his rare pop-up alias Barakas.

With the release of Roman Flügel's very first productions in the early 90s he became part of the legendary German label family of ‘Playhouse’, ’Klang Elektronik’ and ‘Ongaku’ - where he would release almost all his early music. Alongside Ata, Heiko M.S.O. and Jörn Wuttke, Roman would go on to form the spine of the Frankfurt techno scene for a decade or more spawning notable sounds, trends, and more than a few classic hits.

In Death's Dream Kingdom is a voyage into the unknown for Houndstooth and all the artists on it. It represents a complete rethink about what it means to compile and commission music in the streaming era – and the tracks and seductively dark atmospheres conjured as a result are exploring all kinds of new sonic territory, too. In short, the cream of leftfield electronic talent have been given a brief: to take the phrase “in Death's dream kingdom”, or the whole of TS Eliot's poem The Hollow Men from which it comes, as inspiration. The resulting 25 tracks will be released, one by one, together with further online texts, and extraordinary artwork by Jazz Szu-Ying Chen, to build into a new kind of audio-visual artefact. Not an album in the traditional sense, certainly more than just a playlist, it brings together a seriously diverse array of talents into a coherent whole with a vivid aesthetic reverberating through it. It occupies a similar space to the great home listening electronica acts of the 90s – Future Sound Of London, Global Communication, the Artificial Intelligence axis – but there are no throwbacks here: this is radical in sound and thought. Dark music for dark times.

The songs of Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson could occupy a whole Hall Of Fame to themselves. There can’t be any students of popular music who are not familiar with at least a few of their classics, be they their own hits like ‘Solid’ or those they wrote for Motown’s ‘A’ list artists, such as ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough’ and ‘Ain’t Nothing Like The Real Thing’ for Marvin & Tammi and ‘Reach Out And Touch (Somebody’s Hand)’ for Diana Ross.
These and many like them are as much a part of our lives as getting up in the morning. Less well known outside of connoisseur soul circles are the songs they wrote in the years immediately leading up to ‘Ain’t No Mountain’, with their original collaborator Joshie “Jo” Armstead. Between 1964 and 1967, the trio collaborated on a significant number of superior songs to provide hits for artists including Chuck Jackson and Maxine Brown, Betty Everett, Aretha Franklin and scores more.