Been working on Raving Poets remixes the last couple of weeks. Got five tracks down now and can’t wait to do more. On some of them I was really light-handed and it worked pretty well. But the whole time I was wishing for a piece or two where I could just cut loose. And man… I got that now. I tell you, I can’t wait to post these on the Raving Poets site. It’ll be a weekly thing, one track every seven days. And maybe a compilation CD afterward.

Though I’d heard tracks from the Amalgamation of Soundz, (and liked them enough to fork out for a full CD) I’d never heard of the Fabric series – which apparently is up to volume 19 now. Each volume is produced (remixed) by a different artist, the music from the resident DJs at the Fabric club in London. The arc of the 18 tracks on this beast is lush cinematic through lazy lounge pulse and on to (never completely) standard club beats. I’m more drawn to the first half of the album than the second – and it almost seems like the promise of the beginning is never lived up to by the end. But who cares? This whole CD is lightyears better than the truckloads of tedious techno out there. Oh, and the metal CD case in the cardboard sleeve is just too cool. The only problem I have with the CD is, what do I buy now? More AofS or more Fabric series?

Sure, after the three great courses of Verve Remixed I’ll eat any remixed jazz. But just glancing at the cover of this baby, Verve coulda never existed and I would have snapped this one up. Archie Shepp, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Mingus remixed? I’m there. Call me a crazy technoid, but I’m merciless when it comes to quality and I’d rather hear Horowitz play Beethoven on my kickass stereo than hear Beethoven himself play, live. Yeah, yeah, some of the tracks on the "unmixed" CD in this two CD set are better than the remixes. But holy shit… when the remixes are better, it’s like, die and go to heaven time. Tracks 1 and 2 are on an orgasmic up-ramp to the hard bop of Track 3 – which I could listen to on a loop 24/7 till next Tuesday without complaining. Track 4, what the hell? My reaction on first hearing it was, "If somebody told me the remixer had played the original piece backwards and recorded over it, I’d believe ‘em." Friggin cool. A couple tracks in the middle are a bit too "Tower of Power" for my taste, but 8 and 9 just redeem everything. When do we get more????