Registered: Dec 2002
Location: North of the river me old china.
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Review: Tyrant at Fabric

One crazy weekend ...

... my friend Deniz (living in Lyon, France) and her boyfriend Wes (out of Atlanta, GA) came to visit for a long weekend.

Friday night i met up with them about 10.30pm-ish, they'd been out for dinner and i'd been out drinking with work colleagues. There wasn't a whole lot going on in town that night - The End and Fabric were both d'n'b nights, and The Gallery had Lucien Foort and Judge Jules spinning.

Instead we headed out to a small little club - capacity maybe 200 or 250 - next door to The Cross (which was having one of its regular gay nights, so not really what we were looking for either). The Lawnchair Generals were spinning, who i wasn't really familiar with (it was Wes's pick) and an excellent set it proved to be, house with an edge - swerving from techy to elctro and back again. The Key has a very small dance floor - room for maybe 40 or 50 tops, but it's a very cool disco floor with glass squares that light up from underneath a la saturday night fever. the crowd was bouncing up and down pretty damn enthusiastically too ... except for your correspondent who (after a tough week at work) found himself slipping ever so gently into unconsciousness at about 3am on the sofa next to the dance floor ... which was a damn cool sofa too, as somehow it was rigged up to the club sound system bass output .. bodysonic sofas are the way to go!

Anyway Deniz and Wes woke me up to go home about 3.30am, but feeling refreshed from my little sit down, i decided to stay for a little longer ... till 6am, as it turned out ...

Saturday my buddy jamil showed up and the 4 of us cruised around camden market doing a little shopping, picking up (amongst other things) some excellent fresh mushrooms. Back to mine for showers, a little pre-gaming (!) and then we headed off to fabric. We were early so there was no line, but as bill patrick had put them on his list, wes and deniz had to wait half an hour or so because the guest list line was slow to open. Jamil and i decided to pay our money and went right in.

Set times were something like :
rm 2 bill patrick 10 - 12.30, stuart walker (live) 12.30 - 1.30, tyrant 1.30 - close
rm 1 terry francis 10 - 12, funk d'void 12 - 2, adam beyer 2 - 7

^^ now that's what i call a techno party!

Bill Patrick spun some nice minimal techno, interesting layered beat patterns, and got the crowd started to warm up nicely . My ex-girlfriend and her friend vicky showed up sometime during the set and we went to hang out on the infamous beds in the chill out ... Wes and deniz were hanging with the dj crowd. Some guy called diego was there, someone told me he was the manager of some club in ny, rumour was he had flown over with a group of 15 for especially to party at Tyrant that night ...

I caught the last half hour of stuart walker, he picked up the tempo big time from bill's set, then again back to the chill out, as one of the crew was feeling a little unwell and needed looking after. As we sat on the beds chatting and enjoying the atmosphere and the music, we could hear the soaring soundscapes of funk d'void, almost symphonic synth top lines soaring over hard and lethal, hard basslines - great stuff!

Finally it was time for the main event - tyrant. At this stage my ex-'s niece daiana and i were the only ones up for dancing so we hit the floor. Wow. Hard, hard tech house bass with twisted as fuck acid top lines messing with your head, live drum samples flawlessly mixed in by craig and then taken up as a theme by lee, going tribal for a little while with the kick drums and then back to twisted acid. ...aah ... heaven. We had Hooked up with a bunch of brasilians we knew by this stage, wes and deniz were dancing their asses off, everything felt just about perfect. And then lee and craig decided to step it up a gear ... The beats got noticeably harder, sicker and more insistent ....fuck me! To paraphrase teamj5's review of another Tyrant night - people were clearly losing it all over the room, startled glances caught in the strobes, eyes wide, faces contorted. Having been to Fabric many times, I can truly say that Tyrant is one of teh few nights where the whole crowd is guaranteed to stop posing and go crazy.

And go crazy they did - we were loving it, lee and craig were throwing down an amazing set and they knew it too, the old slappers ... They spun on for a full hour after they were supposed to have finished.

I did run into the other room several times to try to catch a flavour of Adam Beyer (talk about spoilt for choice!) but was actually rather disappointed. Each time i looked in, Beyer seemed to be spinning pretty monotonous beats, dry and hard *but* - seemingly without that much variation. This may be a bit harsh (in fact Overseas is in denial!), as i didn't really get a full falvour of the set, but hey - Lee and Craig were just too damn good to hang around anywhere else if it didn't grab me straight by the balls and say "Dance, motherf*cker!". Sorry, Andreas!

To me Tyrant won hands down. And seemingly for a lot of other people too. There was a bunch of techno Dj's there, and by the end they had all gravitated to Tyrant, even though I might have more naturally expected them to be hanging out listening to Beyer.

Outing score: 9. Actually it could have been 9.5 if i included the 3 afterparties we went on to ... but it would be about -50 if i include having to meet my folks for dinner at 6pm

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Last edited by Metro on 07-27-2004 at 07:13 PM

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