Search - James Zabiela :: Renaissance Presents: Alive 2 - Utilities

The Motherboard Of Music

Mark Eremite | Seoul, South Korea | 05/08/2007

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Young golden-boy James Zabiela has been smashing club floors with his talented energy and tech-house mixes since before the turn of the century, his deceptively delerious style drawing the attention of other house icons like Sasha (who signed up the Southampton DJ under Excession) and Nic Fanciulli (whom Zabiela has joined up with for a tour of collaborative appearances across the globe). This two-disc set offers a dense dose of Zabiela's distinctively digital dubbing, showcasing all of the cleverness and ingenuity that have steadily amped the fellow's reputation in Breakbeat circles and Tech-houses worldwide.



The first disc, entitled "Computed," was mixed and mastered via the much-lauded Ableton technology, and it throbs with a heavily mechanized feel. Zabiela takes urgently wicked tracks (Aphex Twin's "Windowlicker" and The Consumer's "Your Soul For Access," to name just a few) and applies, one at a time, steadily progressive tweaks and loops. The overall effect is one of a patiently crafted musical mobile, something both simple and complex, a chorus of elements that orbit perfectly without becoming entangled or overwhelming. Songs like "Atlantic View" with its robotic raindrop effects, or "On/Off" with its wiry back-scratching, or the trance cyclone of "Theme From Silvertone" make one want to keep turning the volume knob further to the right. And Zabiela's original pieces -- "EyeAMComputer" and "Robophobia" -- are absolutely stunning bits of hydraulic house, the kind of gut-punching tech-tracks that shake plaster off the walls and cause arrhythmia. This is the kind of pneumatic noise that makes tech-house so much fun, and Zabiela knows exactly how to whip it out.



The second disc -- "Recorded" -- was mixed live and plays like an hour long snapshot of a deep club's aural aura. (For those over-the-top house heads, Zabiela's liner notes include an in-depth analysis of the second disc's mechanics, providing -- literally -- a second-by-second explanation of the methods used with his samplers and mixing units.) It starts with a careful deep house (almost trancey) lift-off via Samawi and Rodgers' "Through You," but by the time the third track pulls into the deck with Trentemøller's "Rykketid," Zabiela has blasted off into stratospheric realms. The rest of the record is a dip-n-dive poeticism through vinyl-n-velour. Zabiela's loops are shaped like race tracks, his break-beats are as shattered as stained glass, his mixes are as thorough as H and two O's. By the time he eases the throttle down through Allien's sun-struck "Sehnsucht," it's obvious to any listener that Zabiela has made something honey-sweet and downy-dark, a perfect addendum to any house collection, and a pleasant reminder that the cavernous expanses of electronica still have skilled explorers to enlighten their furthest edges."