Mark Farina

"It appears my teleportational coordinates were accurate," some stodgy guy whispers in your ear as this mix begins. Listening to this definitely takes you back to the year 2000.

Mark Farina delivers a cleanly mixed set of signature house cuts on the 40th installment of the London über-club’s compilation series, which has featured the likes of DJ Craze, M.A.N.D.Y., Cut Copy, Diplo, and The Stanton Warriors. While Farina does his own name justice with the mix, he doesn't quite fit in with the pioneering eclecticism of that short-list of Fabric peers in terms of how dance music has progressed.

Farina's mixes have always been bong-friendly (especially the legendary Mushroom Jazz series), but this time around, he's simply lacking the personality that earlier classics such as his San Francisco House Sessions mix from the late '90s and this decade's Connected. His most recent Om release suffered from the same flatness. It’s hard for any discerning fan of house music to admit that the king of chunky-bass dance floor mayhem has lost his touch, but it certainly appears that way.

The mix starts out mellow and has a nice build as it moves through a laundry list of prominent US house music producers, including Chuck Love, JT Donaldson, Inland Knights, and LawnChair Generals, and DJ Sneak. It seems like it's about to take off, once it hits John Larner & Slater Hogan's "Hetting Ready" and transitions into the best, most contemporary sounding track on the mix, the Inland Knights' "Where Ya At," but it just plateaus and eventually flatlines from there.

And while Farina's trademark 16 bar bass-kill mixing works in a club where the impact of the new bass line is half the fun, one would hope for a little more complexity when concocting a mix for a legendary European compilation. Maybe it's a sign that the West Coast style house that dominated the US at the turn of the century has lost its luster in the wake of the hipper, dirtier sounds coming from San Fran's Claude Von Stroke and his Dirty Bird label, and the Booka Shade/Get Physical European electro and tech-house movements.

The mix still works great as background music (not sure if that's even a compliment) and will certainly please die-hard fans of Farina and chunky West Coast and Chicago style house, but look elsewhere if you were hoping that Farina or the genre has evolved to match the new direction house as a whole is taking.

—Chris Nelson
06.16.08