A-Trak / Various

On Fabriclive .45, A-Trak manages to encapsulate most of the major dance music trends of the last decade and condense them into a neat little package. There's a little B-More club (DJ Class), a little Baile funk (DJ Mp4), some spacey electro pop (Metronomy), a bit of dubstep (Skepta) and some disco-fied house (Voodoo Chilli). There's even some classic turn-of-the-millennium UK garage (DJ Zinc). In the hands of almost anyone else, a mix album that squishes so many styles into such a tight space would quickly degenerate into a scattered, disjointed mess. A-Trak, on the other hand, makes rapidly switching between genres look easy. So easy, in fact, that he finds time to throw in some deft scratching and live remixing along the way. In an electronic music landscape where a new subgenre is born every four-and-a-half minutes, it's good of A-Trak to remind us that ultimately, everything is connected.