f all of the sea changes to my listening habits wrought by Soulwax’s now-legendary ...As Heard on Radio Soulwax mix series, few (if any) approached the totality with which the Dewaele brothers obliterated the fondness I once held for—ugh—progressive house. In the instant it took for those shrieking “WHERE’S. YOUR. HEAD. AT-AT-AT”s to come cascading out of my speakers on top of ELP’s “Peter Gunn,” all of the genre’s slinky charms may as well have dissipated like a fart in a wind tunnel; I’d compare it to the mythical effect “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was said to have had on the consumers of big, stupid hard-rock music if reality actually bore that particular Rolling Stone talking point out even a little bit.

So shed a tear, I guess, for Luke Slater, whose Fabric 32 would have undoubtedly sent me off barking at the moon if I’d heard it half a decade ago. If the tenets of aesthetic judgment I picked up from a handful of Mixmags, shamelessly overpriced by Borders, still hold true today, then Slater’s mix is a startlingly accomplished work: Fabric 32 is painstakingly dark, fixated on track-to-track seamlessness, and remarkably hands-off in execution. If techno music can be described as love songs machines write for and about each other, then Slater’s mix consists of nothing but robotic feel-up anthems; your hand will never make its way between your dance partner’s legs half as tastefully.

Unfortunately, this is a record review, not a Quality of Potential Action review, and to that end Slater’s record is indefensibly boring. Once upon a time, Fabric 32 may have been able to get by on its closed-circuit sound, but now the lack of any evident human participation beyond that necessary to design and fabricate (no pun intended) the packaging grates like your next-door neighbor’s overly loud television. It’s one thing, after all, to shy away from vocal mixes or epic breakdowns in favor of deeper, dubbier grooves. The extreme to which Slater pushes this aesthetic, however, borders on inappropriate. I ripped this mix as one track and consequently spent the first fifteen to twenty minutes waiting for the next song to begin, and I say that as someone who spent a lot of time last year with La Monte Young’s The Well-Tuned Piano. Just a few months ago, Rub-N-Tug dropped a hellishly deep, wickedly engaging mix of dark disco and relentlessly churning rhythms on the same label; listening to it immediately after Slater’s mix reminds one of nothing so much as using a healthy dose of Steely Dan to flush out one’s system of a recent encounter with Manheim Steamroller.

There will, of course, be devotees of Slater’s oeuvre up in arms over a perceived slight to their musical intoxicant of choice (or possibly over a potential misapplication of the term “progressive house” to Slater’s aesthetic, the term not being one I’ve heard in polite conversation since 2001). Of course, these people hardly need to have Fabric 32 reviewed for them in the first place; I’d put the odds of everyone who might want this CD already owning it as being better than pretty good. To everyone else who sees the Fabric label and gets whisked away to some of their more intoxicating releases—Cut Copy, perhaps, or maybe Jacques Lu Cont’s 2003 entry—please let me offer my sincere assurance that Slater’s disc belongs in the company of those more vaunted mixes in the sense of tastefulness alone. There’s no playfulness to it, no spirit of adventure, no challenge to the audience to keep up—no fun, my babe, no fun.