Live at Arena

Right, honesty first. The surviving upload of this set is titled “Arena” and gives nothing else away. No city. No country. No tracklist. I could guess, and there are a couple of obvious guesses, but a guess dressed up as a fact is worse than an admitted gap — so the gap stays.

What is on the recording is more interesting than the missing sleeve notes: an hour and five minutes from 21 December 2003, with Jimmy Van M and Chris Fortier working the same room.

That pairing is the reason this is here. Neither of them is a superstar-DJ story. Both of them are infrastructure.

Van M set up Balance Promote Group in 1995, held a Twilo residency from 1996 to 2000, and later helped put the Delta Heavy tour together — the production that carried Sasha and Digweed round America — while opening it himself. Fortier built Fade and the Balance Record Pool, which is how a great deal of this music actually reached the DJs who played it.

In other words, these two spent years making other people's nights work. And it shows in the set. There's no scramble for the room, no sense of anyone trying to establish themselves inside the first ten minutes. It's patient, groove-first progressive house from a point when the genre had got tougher and cleaner but hadn't yet lost the long view.

A back-to-back also does something a solo set can't. You get two selectors nudging each other, and the joins tell you as much as the records. Whoever is steering, nobody is showing off.

So treat it as a document rather than a showcase. It's an hour of 2003 progressive that only exists because somebody recorded it and somebody else kept it, from two men whose names belong in this story a lot more prominently than they usually appear.

If you want the fuller picture, the Chris Fortier profile covers Fade and Balance properly, and the Jimmy Van M one covers Twilo, Delta Heavy and why “warm-up DJ” was never an insult.