Metro Area / Various
Fabric 43
By Dimitri Nasrallah

Fans of disco revivalists Metro Area should have little trouble imagining what the duo of Morgan Geist and Darshan Jesrani would do with a Fabric mix. Fabric 43 often sounds like the logical continuation of the Geist’s 2004 mix, Unclassics, which collected obscure disco tracks from the ’78 to ’85 post-disco crash era. Fabric 43 mines similar territory and tempos but moves further into the ’80s, as a generation of artists like Gary’s Gang, the Disco Four, Dreamhouse and Heaven 17 begin to move into areas such as electro funk and synth pop. Metro Area are interested in the perennial b-sides to the early and mid-’80s dance scene, where longer dub and dance versions often pushed poppier tracks into nightclubs. It’s an eclectic mix, to be sure, with very early Ministry sharing space with Devo and Jean-Luc Ponty, but it’s also the resurrection of an almost forgotten era of dance music that fills the gaps between disco, house and techno, an era that acts like the Glimmers and Optimo’s Betty Botox have begun to focus on more specifically in recent months. Fabric 43 is fun and a bit cheesy, and that cheekiness makes it one of the more enticing Fabric mixes in a couple of editions.

This mix focuses on a period that’s post-disco and pre-house, tracks that were mostly relegated to b-sides as dub or dance versions. Why focus on this era now and what can today’s dance music climate learn from these records?
Morgan Geist: It’s some of the music we love. I’d venture to say today’s dance music climate can learn a lot from almost any other era besides, say, the late ’90s. It kind of feels like we’re in the late ’90s again to me, maybe because that’s right about when we felt alienated by new records and decided to start Metro Area. That’s kind of how it feels between the tuneless, aggressive stuff people seem to like in most clubs, with the over-repetitive bootleg edits on the “underground” side.

How big are your respective record collections?
I can say women visiting my house have never complained about the size of my record collection, but maybe they are just being kind to me and don’t want to hurt my feelings. I only buy stuff I want to listen to and learn from. I’m not a collector. There’s loads of stuff in mine you probably would get weird looks for playing at a dance club. (Fabric)
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