What does “Finishing Fabric” mean? I have successfully collected digital versions of the 100 releases of Fabric and the 100 releases of Fabric Live. For my purposes, the release count ignores the radio promo mixes. These electronic music mix series were published via the sister label of the Fabric London nightclub.
So why would anyone in their right mind pursue this?
First off, there’s a lot of good music for the ears. Not every last bit of it is to my taste, but there are more winners than losers. And I haven’t even managed to give all of it a listen yet.
Second, both series span 17 years, which is multiple eternities in the electronic dance music world. Some of the biggest names in DJ mixing contributed releases and I’m sure some ground breaking music was incorporated. The span across genres is impressive: house, tech house, breaks, hip hop, techno, drum and bass, dubstep, grime, etc. In some sense, the collection is a historical longitudinal snapshot of changing musical tastes. Definitely not comprehensive, but maybe there’s a musicology retrospective study waiting to be unearthed.
Lastly, fun with Discogs Music Metadata. Let’s just say, trying to come up with a coherent database view of the Discogs data on these series has proven challenging in data wrangling, data modeling, and data engineering senses.