House Is A Feeling

If any of you read dance music forums, you’ll be used to people putting up their own tracks for the appraisal of others. It’s a little like the way in other forums people put up gigantic chunks of their hearts and souls for the appraisals of others, except often with less effort.

Anyway on the Irish incarnations of these threads the response “fair play” is a very popular one, but often it feels like damning with faint praise. What do people mean when, in response to someone saying “listen to my piece of music”, they say “fair play”?

“Fair play” for getting out of bed this morning? “Fair play” for making the gigantic effort it takes to fuck around with Ableton for a while? “Fair play” for trying to break the cycle of boredom and laziness that permeates the internet and actually doing something? “Fair play” for creating something instead of parasitically commenting on the work of others? “Fair play” for being the one on the recieving end of this “fair play” and not the one drooling and trotting it out?”Fair play” for doing something that isn’t eating, fucking, sleeping or drinking? Or maybe, unlike me, right now, they’re just being nice! (cut me some slack I have a chronic illness! fair play to my doctors)

Might seem like I’m being silly, but I know exiled Backlash DJ Funboi said to me recently: “I’d rather if someone said ‘your track is fucking shit’ than ‘fair play’ on one of my threads”. I agree. In fact, I reckon if you started assessing art by how many “fair plays” it recieved it’d be like a pop cultural version of Digg, inverted and specific to Ireland. You could know for sure when something recieved a hearty amount of “fair plays”, that you didn’t have to bother with this musical aran sweater!

Anyway all of this has nothing to do with Fairmont, aka Jake Fairley, apart from the fact that he has the word “fair” in his name. From the Bpitch Control compilation “Camping”, here’s the rather ingenious Jake with “Pavilion”. This one is quite cinematic and has a little touch of dubstep for me, not at the anthemic level of “Gazebo” but still addictive and beautiful.

Some of the tracks from this comp also have nice 12 inch versions, which are longer than the paltry 4 minutes given to them on the “Camping” CD, so here’s hoping “Pavilion” gets tracked up like this at some stage. From the same comp, now with a long version, is Larsson’s amazing “Off Voices”. It’s on Beatport now, or in last week’s Lonrach.

Rest assured this one will be getting a fair amount (a Fairmont? sorry, I’ll get my coat)) of airplay (careful, don’t elide that) from me. Also for the Irish readers, has Donal Dineen played this yet? Haven’t caught his show in a while but this seems like something he’d be into.