Album: James Lavelle

Fabriclive. 01, Fabric

Through his stewardship of the Mo'Wax label, James Lavelle helped to broaden the notion of house music to take in the various strands of jazz, ragga, blues, ambient and avant-garde that have made UK house the world's most vibrant and experimental dance culture over the past decade. His current Friday-night residency at the London club Fabric is the source of this, his first mix album in seven years. As you'd expect, it's a little more varied than the usual DJ albums, which tend to lash similarly styled tracks together over an unchanging "boom-cha, boom-cha" drum pattern, with most of the skill going into the seamless mixing of one cut into another. Few, if any, of them would choose to open their set, as Lavelle does here, with a drum solo from the Seventies Motown prog-rockers Rare Earth, and follow it up with the conflation of "Windmills of Your Mind" and "Tubular Bells" that is the Psychonauts' "Circles", before slipping into the classical-rock organ loops of DJ Shadow's "Organ Donor". The rest of the set isn't quite that daring, with name acts such as the Chemical Brothers, Howie B and Orbital rubbing shoulders with fringe artists such as Lazonby, Landmine and Echomen, but it's an enjoyable journey, before Lavelle pulls off his final coup by dropping into the becalmed territory of Radiohead's "Everything in Its Right Place". Just as innovative is the delivery system: the album contains a Direct Debit mandate for a subscription to the Fabric CD series, which at £6 per disc represents pretty decent value.