DJ Chris "Rockswell" Devlin of Spank Rock is at the Apollo Theater, getting ready to open for Björk, when I reach him on the phone. His partner, producer Alex "Armani XXXchange" Epton, recently remixed the Icelandic iconoclast's "Earth Intruders," and this New York show offers a rare chance for the two acts to share a stage.

"We were gonna go on tour with her," says Devlin. "But some logistical stuff wasn't working out. But we got to do this nice gig with her at the Apollo, which is pretty dope."

After the mad blowup that was their 2006, it's been a relatively quiet, though still dope, year for the Philly-based Spank Rock crew—Devlin, Epton, DJ Ronnie Darko, and "cool disco MC Spank Rock" Naeem Juwan. In between moving crowds at Coachella and SXSW and appearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live, the quartet found time to record an ace mix for prestigious London nightclub Fabric's Fabric Live series.

Spank Rock performed at Fabric a year ago and were invited to record a mix for the series, according to Devlin. Over the course of the year, the group went back and forth picking out tracks, with Devlin and Darko selecting songs and Epton working on sequencing them. In between their initial track selection and the final version of Spank Rock's Fabric Live 33 came the dreary process of licensing songs.

"They have to license everything," says Devlin, "'cause it's not a bootleg, it's a mix that's sold in major record stores. So you give them a list, and they send it back, saying, 'These are the songs you get,' or, 'Sorry, you can't have these.' And then you send another list. Then finally you have the list and you just kind of roll with it and make it happen."

Spank Rock were able to clear most of their song choices, but there were a couple of exceptions and, in one case, somestipulations.

"There was some Talking Heads stuff," says Devlin. "And you can't license any of that, really. David Byrne is, I guess, pretty particular with that catalogue. That Yes song that we put on, 'Owner of a Lonely Heart,' there was a stipulation with that. It couldn't be scratched; it couldn't be altered in any way. You could mix it with another song, but you couldn't fuck with the audio; you couldn't touch that pristine piece of music, which I thought was pretty funny."

Even with some clearance hassles, Fabric Live 33 boasts an impressive track list. The mix moves from Kurtis Blow's golden-age hiphop jam "The Breaks," to the globalized discotheque of CSS, to the Contours' "Do You Love Me," to Ed Banger's scuzzy electro, like the tracks were made for each other. In between, there's New York disco classic "The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight," Switch's take on the "Apache" break, Tangerine Dream, Rick Ross, some Spank Rock exclusive remixes, and more shit than should rightly fit in just over an hour of music.

For Devlin and crew, though, it's no big deal, "It's just a lot of stuff that we played out last year on a regular basis."

While Fabric mixes always provide a geeky peek into a DJ's record bag or a reasonable recreation of an hour in the club, they're rarely the kind of instant house party that Spank Rock bring to the table(s). That reckless energy comes from the crew's willingness to play around with the unwritten rules of the mix, to drop raps over familiar tracks, add samples and sound effects, and just generally mess around (but not with Yes).

"We just like to have fun in the studio," says Devlin. "We drink Sparks and shit like that. We get restless and start messin' around and things happen. Somebody starts singing, and someone goes, 'We totally got to put that on the CD, man.' So during Kano's [Italo-disco classic "I'm Ready"], Pase Rock is over, and we're like, 'Pase, you gotta rap on this part.' We all start singing the falsetto part, and Alex is like, 'We gotta mic that.' It's just a way to make it more us, so when we listen to it, we feel like, 'Okay, we made that mix, and it has a lot to do with us and not just the music.'"

Whether performing live or DJing, the group rock a similar blend of malt-liquor energy and anything-goes mixing. Or as Devlin puts it, "Oh, man—we are gonna get drunk and trainwreck and have horn whistles and do a lot of yelling. It's gonna be amazing. It's gonna be a fuckin' party!"