Dubstep defines itself. In his Barcelona lecture, Benga explains the purpose of these. Another crucial element of dubstep is soundsystem culture. Digital Mystikz and soundsystem culture. Mala had been teaching kids to use music software in his hometown of South Norwood not far from Croydon , but when the government pulled its funding he decided to pursue his own music full time.
With nowhere to play the music they were making for their DMZ label founded in , the trio started a new clubnight, also called DMZ, that would go on to become the spiritual home of dubstep. One of the hallmarks of dubstep in general and DMZ in particular was a return to analogue aesthetics: the almost reverential treatment of vinyl releases and, even more vitally, one-off acetate dubplates that could be pressed up on the day of a rave and played that night. Describing his style, Mala highlights the way that growing up as the son of working class parents in an expensive city like London could be a struggle.
Not necessarily outwardly but inwardly. Hyperdub signals the future. It gave the world "electronica," acts like the Chemical Brothers and Crystal Method became MTV staples, and for a minute or two ravers in the United States were having arguments about whether dance music was mainstream, and what that meant to their local scenes and communities. Electronica never went away, even if radio stations stopped playing it alongside other alternative acts and MTV stopped playing videos altogether.
Instead, as artists like Moby increasingly integrated old fashioned songwriting into their electronic music, dance music production became the backbone of pop music. They'll book a couple dubstep guys at Red Rocks in Colorado, a 10, person venue, and they'll pack it out with a couple headliners like Flux Pavillion and Skrillex. That's the thing that really struck me about the rave scene. It has some longevity. It wasn't a flash in the pan after all. And a lot of these kids are getting into the scene through dubstep, dubstep is huge.
Everything is just done on a whole other level. There's a lot more money, and it's a lot more professional. Are there still parties, like 'rave parties' that happen in old warehouses or whatever? There are, that whole thing is still there, there's just like this whole new level.
And that book ends on a fairly sort of downbeat. Basically, the idea was that the music will carry on, but it will never be as big as it was in the nineties. It seemed like America was a lost cause, in terms of [dance music] being a mainstream thing.
When you've gone from events where there's a thousand or fifteen hundred people you feel like you're in a massive — the jungle term, the 'massive. And then I noticed there were lots of different events in bars, and people were doing more talking than dancing. In the mids everything just sort of seemed to sort of be declining. Anyhow, I'd seen some of the coverage of it… and I really did feel like you know, history repeating.
You had the massive event, the crazy clothes, and people dying. And the public outcry, and the crackdown, and I think they had to move the operation out to Las Vegas… and it seemed exactly like a repeat of what happened in the 90s, and I wasn't expecting it. As Reynolds recently described it in the Guardian , rave peaked for America in the s.
But a lot has changed in the intervening fifteen years or so: The rave scene pulled back for a while, and eventually became rebranded as EDM. The word "rave" has been replaced by "festival. In house culture, or even dubstep in Britain, there's a lot of referencing of roots reggae, or the early days of house, or the early days of jungle. In dance culture, the purist stuff, there's sort of this in-built reverence to the past.
And what I liked about the EDM vibe, there's none of that: it's just like 'now, now, now. I sensed that 'this is our music, this is our generation. This weekend I watched a documentary called Re:Generation on Hulu.
The whole thing was pretty polite and noncontroversial, exactly what the corporate sponsors, The Grammys and Hyundai, paid for. One reviewer called it "a commercial without a product," a line I wish I would have written my own self. For his segment, Skrillex got to work with the remaining members of The Doors.
Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger were into it, coming into the studio together to lay down some of their trademark organ and guitar over a programmed beat. What would you do if you found yourself in the studio with the living Doors for a brief afternoon? It sounds like The Doors stripped of everything that makes them, well, The Doors. And why not? In July , Scientific Reports published a paper titled "Measuring the Evolution of Contemporary Western Popular Music," with an argument that will ring true to your more reactionary music fans.
Using the Million Song Dataset, a publicly accessible database of song characteristics like pitch data, loudness, and timbre, researchers were able to analyze , songs recorded and released between and The conclusion? Over the last fifty years, pop songs have become progressively more homogenized.
That is, variety within pop songs decreased. And the chord progressions and melodies have become more predictable. In addition, the sound palette has become progressively less varied, and music has become louder. I know in terms of electronic music it's never been melodically sophisticated, it's more been about rhythm and syncopation. Which is absolutely true, of course. Even when a track sounds particularly simple or unvarying, one only has to hear it in a club to see how much is missed merely listening to music.
The last time I had been to the venue, the world-renowned noise duo Lightning Bolt had filled the space with a screeching, claustrophobic din that was produced, improbably, by a single drummer and bass player. It was the sound of someone tuning a radio into armageddon. By contrast, Coki delivered the sound of that same radio listener settling into the aftermath of armageddon: zero history and zero panic, just a timeless frequency so simple and so large as to fill up the entire room, to fill one's entire existence for an hour or two.
Despite the circuitous route the genre took, the controversy and the metamorphoses, the promise of dubstep is still a bassline wobble implying something that feels absolutely true: The past is over. Electric Daisy Carnival photos by Cesar Sebastian. Soundsystem photo by Unknown. Cookie banner We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from.
By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies. Share: Facebook Twitter. Sticky TOC engaged! Do not remove this! I took it as a sign and headed to the club. Rattling with a weird percussive energy, this track evokes other worlds. Pirate radio. We can do whatever we want We can do whatever we want "I made this song in my bedroom when I was living illegally in a warehouse in downtown LA. You know, bro — as in, thick.
Or stupid. This is our music, this is our generation This is our music, this is our generation. Dance music was about to take over — then grunge happened Then grunge happened. As garage was disintegrating, there were people who wanted to keep it dark, and still MC-focused, but these records, they were the mongrels of garage: creative and prolific, in their own dark, weird corner.
The garage heads were adamant that this music wasn't garage, but that was the point. El-B had a real topography of a style, in the warmth and darkness of his instrumentalism. It was all hidden in the signal and noise of poppy garage at first, but then it became obvious that they needed to concentrate it into one or two places to find its feet. For me, it was all down to my sister, Sarah ["Soulja" Lockhart]. She got me onto Freek FM. I remember being years-old when I got my first AM slot.
She was also supplying me with tunes because of her work: for a distributor, then at a record shop where the Vibe bar used to be, and then at Black Market in Soho. I'd get all the test pressings early through her and when she started Ammunition with Neil Joliffe, I was getting all of the promos, too.
Even Hatcha was playing Eskimo. KODE9: Hyperdub started in as a web magazine, but we also did a few events in the early days before becoming a label. In , we did a launch for a philosophy book about bacteria written by Luciana, the wife of [late poet and MC] Spaceape , with Spaceape doing readings from the book sound-tracked by lots of bass.
Between I was writing about this darker garage stuff, like El-B, Horsepower Productions and Oris Jay, and Ammunition were running a website called dubplate. Because I was writing about all of these artists on Hyperdub, I ended up running dubplate. It's kind of like… dubstep. Why don't we just call it dubstep? The name made sense, though. Basically, there were three aspects of dub that influenced dubstep. The most important was playing the instrumental versions of vocal garage tracks, which was a little like what dub was to reggae—the instrumental of a full vocal.
El-B pushed the release of those instrumentals: trying to bring the moodiness from early Metalheadz into garage, and so on. The second was dub as a methodology, which, for me, is apparent in all dance music: manipulating sound to create impossible sonic spaces using reverb, echo, and such.
The third is the influence of the genre called dub. All of that, along with soundsystem culture, were the elemental influences of early dubstep. The sound needed a hub to grow, and that hub was Big Apple.
I remember when I went into the shop for the first time. I was supposed to interview Benga, and Hatcha and Artwork and Danny from DND were hanging out the window with a catapult and rolls of wet toilet paper, firing at people in the market. They haven't changed. Skream: Croydon-born producer and DJ who was picked up as the so-called teenage poster boy of the dubstep scene.
Chef: A dub cutter and engineer at Croydon's Transition Studios, he was also one of the early core DJs of the dubstep scene, joining Skream and Benga's Smooth Criminals crew as a teenager. Because I was their mate, I would hang out on that floor all day, waiting for new records to come in. There was a recording studio upstairs and after a few years the shop owner, John Kennedy, said, "Do you want to move into this studio? You can have it. By the time I was making techno as Grain , garage had started to creep into the shop.
I was so into the US stuff, like Masters at Work , but walking downstairs and hearing the UK stuff, too, I decided to put garage vocals into the techno. Once I started making garage as Menta with Danny Harrison, who I was also engineering music for, it had got to a point where you'd see that we had three or four white labels on the wall at any one time, under five or six different names. We were sometimes doing 5, to 10, of our white labels then, easily. If you ask me what the turning point in that shop was, it was Benny Ill.
I made a record that came out on Decay Records: a weird label run by this nutty guy called Heidi from Switzerland, based out of a flat in Streatham. John and I went and made this record with him, and Benny Ill was the engineer. He knew how to use the room and desk, he had a TR drum machine—and he was phenomenal. We'd ask him to help us mix the record and he'd walk in, look at it, and turn everything down. Turn the hi-hat up, light a joint and slightly turn a frequency that you couldn't hear; sit back, make a cup of tea, then get a compressor out… You'd think: 'What the fuck is he doing?
One day he knocked on our studio door and said, "Awrite Arthur mate, I've been making some garage. Can you have a listen? We said, "Benny, your beats are all… on the wrong fucking beat, mate": samples from films, in with this dubby, weird bass.
He said, "What do you think I should do? I remember Chef used to come down on his moped with a soundsystem on the back. He'd park it outside, and people would be hanging around and listening to records. I'd taken some tapes down to Big Apple for the owner, John, and this fella Neil Joliffe, who worked for a distributor that supplied to the shop, to listen to.
John told me to give the tracks to Neil because he was dealing with a lot of garage stuff that we liked—labels like Public Demand, Allstar, Acetate—and was in a position of knowledge for distributors and pressing plants. One thing lead to another, and Neil ended up creating [record label] Tempa out of Ammunition for us, as Horsepower Productions.
He just wanted to DJ. He got decks and got really good, really fucking fast, and he had brilliant taste. He was also phenomenal at selling records—even the absolute dog-shit ones. If someone came in, he could turn it up loud and give "the Hatcha nod"—and then they'd get home with their haul and think, 'The fuck have I bought this for?
There was a weird relationship with him and John because he was brilliant, but didn't like to work. He just wanted to play records. He had a way of making you buy a record that you may not have necessarily wanted when you went in. What do you do, tell him, "Nah man, I've got 20 quid and I want to eat dinner tonight? You couldn't have it too loud, because there were people buying flowers and fruit outside and shit, but at the same time it was a very cosy and personable experience.
I mean, where else was I going to buy Big Apple ? I was like, "Who? What do you mean? When I walked in I saw this little guy behind the counter and—honestly?
I was apprehensive. There was a lot of shit going on around in the ghetto. We were kids, doing stupid things, and he knew my younger cousin was in jail, so I think they thought I was trouble.
When I told him I was there to show him some music, he was like, "Really? Bring it in, then! I was never a person that went out and listened to a lot of music, so it wasn't till Hatcha was playing me Skream and Benga bits in the shop that the sound started to fit in my head.
I was like, 'Rahhhh, I like this, but what the fuck is it? I used to sit in the back of Benny's studio most evenings, too. My mom thought it was a bit strange, that I was going to this guy's house to sit and watch him make music. I used to be stoned most of the time, but so was Benny.
I found it amazing to watch him work—he was using Cubase on an old Atari, for fuck's sake. I'd never seen anything like it. Benga was friends with my older brother, and I was a friend with Benga's older brother, Flash; through girls and hanging out in Croydon. I was working in Big Apple on a Sunday, and Benga's big brother came in and said, "My brother makes music," and we ended up speaking on the phone before we met, playing each other tunes down the phone.
Back then I made tunes in batches: I'd get an idea rolling and as soon as I got bored, I'd start another one. I'd take all those ideas down to Hatcha, and he'd pick which ones he wanted me to finish.
They'd knock out six records a day; basic as fuck loops with a bar intro before the drop. If they wanted tracks for that weekend, they'd just go and cut them as they were, because they weren't going to play them for more than 32 bars. You don't need to make a seven-minute epic when you only ever play the first minute. People were like, "Yeah, this kid Benga, he's the boy wonder. He's years-old and he mixes like EZ. I bumped into them at a house party and Artwork came up to me and said, "I've heard about you, Chef.
A lot of people are rating you. We ended up playing together everywhere—in snooker clubs, house parties—after that. They'd book one of us, and 15 of us would turn up. It was a cover of the Stevie Wonder tune, but I made a bootleg of the flip, the Bump N Flex Dub ; with this long intro on it, with me talking all pitched down on it.
I'll never forget that. We heard that's where Grooverider got his dubs cut, and that was enough for us, frankly, so I started going there in probably There were rules: you only paid for your own dubs if you wanted them for yourself. If Hatcha wanted one of my tracks to play out, he'd have to pay to get it cut to dub, and then that was his copy.
It all depended on what rate you were on, too. I was on 25 quid for two sides of a inch, 30 quid for a inch. They swapped from inch to inch 'cause they "ran out" of inch, around , but that was a step up. Going back to inch might have made us look cheap, y'know? JOE NICE: I started pressing and stayed on inch because it was less expensive but, for me, when I was playing the early Dub War parties , it was as much a visual cue as anything else.
If someone sees me pull out something that doesn't look the same size from a distance, they're thinking, "Yo, is that a inch? Yooo, inch are dubplates. Yooo, Joe Nice has a dubplate? Oh shit—I gotta hear what this brother's gonna play.
I said to him straight up, "That's my job, you can take that advert down. Jason really helped get the best out of not just me, but everyone. MALA: It was very important for me to be part of finishing a track, and that meant going to Jason: hearing the difference between my finished version and Jason's version; seeing what subtle changes in frequencies he'd adjusted, what compression or limiting he might have applied.
It was, and still is, expensive, but back then it was overtime money that was paying for my dubplates, so if you're paying 30 or 40 quid for two tracks, you'd got to be damn sure that those tracks were as good as they could possibly be. What I learned most from Jason is that certain frequencies just won't translate on vinyl—and if you roll off, roll off, and roll off the bottom end, it actually gets heavier.
The one that sticks out the most is "Anti War Dub. I time-stretched and sampled the vocal, so the version everyone knows sounds totally different from Coki's version. With my version, I remember Jason saying, "I don't need to do anything to this. When I gave it to Jason, he turned around in his chair and said, "We're going to have to cut this mono you know, bruv"—and I felt like such an idiot.
Jason wouldn't tell you what to do, but if you asked the right questions—"How could I make my bass sound tighter? And not just for the quality of the sound, either: it's the way the tracks were built. Jason would get solid bottom ends, and the hard crack of a snare out of you. Other engineers may have tried to round those elements off, to make it more of a "poppier" mixdown, but he got it.
It took me four hours to cut a dub with four tracks on it once, and my brother said, "It's taken you four hours to earn 35 quid, are you mad? I wasn't even a dub cutter. I'd spend six months working to get money to buy a box of dubs, which was quid at the time, then cut them and go home depressed because they didn't sound good. I learned to cut by playing them myself and not liking what I heard.
It worked out for everyone in the long run, though. I was learning when dubstep was beginning to grow, and it was perfect for all of us because there weren't any rules—and by the time dubstep had come into its own, I knew the sound that I was looking for.
The thing that I loved most about dubstep was the bass—and historically, engineers are scared of bass. The sound of wood vibrating is my favorite sound in the world. Want to read more about dubstep and other dance music? Lucky you, we've got a whole website dedicated to it. Towards the end of the peak of garage, I was cutting for people like Hatcha—when he was in a crew called Stonecold GX Crew , I believe—and he started bringing me this new stuff which he just referred to as "more tribal.
He was without a doubt the first person to bring dubstep to Transition. There were times when I'd go out to a club, hear a track that I'd cut, then ring up the producer on the Monday and say, "I've cut it for you again. If that dub is leaving Transition with my name on it, it has to be perfect. I've had so many arguments with sound engineers in nightclubs, and with other producers, too: people asking me to re-create Mala, Loefah, Coki.
When DMZ blew up, it nearly gave me a nervous breakdown. I'd be getting 15, 20 calls a day while pulling a hour week. Because of that, at the time, I was always aware of the fact that if this sound got really big, I couldn't cut every dubstep record that came out—so I held the levels back.
I didn't cut them too loud. I didn't make the music too un-dynamic because, physically, it needed somewhere to go. A lot of current pop is really loud, so for a given level on your hi-fi, it screams at you. An old Bob Marley track isn't as loud, though. It's dynamic: peaks and troughs, loud parts and quiet parts. That's what I mean when I say I held back, because there's only a certain point before it's no longer listenable. Everyone came to Transition, but some really stood out.
Benga was coming to me when he was 15 years old. I remember sitting there, in the studio, and I said to him, "You know what, bruv? I'm going to give you a discount. I can't believe you're saving your dinner money to cut dubs. He doesn't want too much processing," so I just made it presentable.
A lot of electronic music at the time was too computerized for me—quantized, even—but Burial reminded me of how Robbie from Sly and Robbie played bass. When he wants to hype it up, he'll sometimes play in front of the drum note, others on the note, sometimes behind the note—all to create mood.
That's why I loved it when Kode9 brought me Burial's music: life isn't on the beat. They're not mucking about. Like Coki's "Burnin. Skream and Benny play it—two pull-ups. By the end of the night, people were still screaming for it. If you were in the Ammunition crew, you'd go through Sarah Lockhart. You have to imagine her as the early version of the internet for us: our "Soulja.
I'd take that tape to the cutting house, wait in the queue, and cut the dub without knowing what it'd sound like. Even if the dub costs 40 quid, I've probably spent double that trying to get to London, the cutting house, and back again, but you told yourself it was worth doing because when you played that dub out that night, you could be certain that no one else in the world had it.
Since I was the DJ, they wanted to give it to me as a present. If they didn't give us their music, they weren't going to get released and booked, so it was in both our interests. By a certain point I was only playing tracks by maybe four or five producers—Skream, Benga, Coki, some D1 bits—but I built a very close relationship with Loefah.
By that point, Mala and Loefah had given their beats to Hatcha, and had come down to the night to hear them played out. A lot of people were saying that it was too minimal; that it wasn't "worthy" of a club, but that's what we were buzzing out to.
The garage slowly disappeared from my sets as Loefah progressed, and it got to the point where we were both in so deep with one another. It took about a year for people to start to get a physical groove with my tracks, but that was the best thing about it: it had vague influences, but nothing overt enough that it could be grasped right away.
We wanted there to be no discernible garage influence at all. We were fed up with all the skippiness. We'd had ten years of breaks, from hardcore, jungle, and drum and bass, so we started with half-step beats. I'd play tracks down the phone to Youngsta every night, and he was very critical. He'd be like, "Take that hi-hat out"; "That's too loud," telling me how to mix down over the phone. Half-step was intricate.
The backbone of it would be a kick and a snare on the half-time, so quite regular, and in between it would be this mad percussion; rattling off itself in the negative space, as a form of call and response.
I see the space in between the drumbeats as just as much of an instrument as anything else in the track. From the outside it would look simple, but when you checked it, it was like, "Fucking hell, there's a lot going on in there.
If five of them are mine, I'm not just going to chuck them out there. Not 2-step garage. It was about taking a break out and having as much space as possible, while still maintaining a groove. Some of it was so atmospheric that it was like a soundscape, but we didn't take it that far and that's what made it a winner. Me, I'm weird. I like things a certain way, and that was how you could make a whole new track out of a blend of two of Loefah's beats. Even if two beats are perfectly in key with each other—which they always should be, beat-matching aside—it's about the pin-point precision timing of mixing together two or three beats that are so perfectly in key, and so stripped back, that they have elements in each that the other doesn't; that when put together, they create a whole new tune.
You know how drum and bass breaks go well together because of how they're structured? Percussion, melody, and leads would vary massively for us, and the kicks could be where they wanted, but the snare? That's why I've never practiced. I haven't had any form of mixing equipment in my house for ten years. Loefah would give me a tune and I'd play it on Rinse, some time between 9 and 11 PM, and that's it till the next club or radio show. It's like math: if I knew that the snare is always there, my mixes would work.
Because producers would burn tracks to CD, they'd bring sonically weaker, but more experimental, music to try out in the club. If I bring a dub to the club, I have to get that tune properly finished because it'll cost me 40 quid. A CD costs you, what, 60p? It was more instant, but then you get half-finished tunes played in the club. He didn't cut it, though. He played it off a CD, and Loefah was livid: "You played my track un-mastered, on a soundsystem! It's not fucking balanced.
We were funding DMZ ourselves—through student loans, and Mala and Coki's wages—so we felt that we had the right to be precious. ORIS JAY: If I were to pin it right down, it came from the reggae soundsystem culture: you'd have guys with systems from different sides of Jamaica, and the most popular system would get booked for all the parties, so there's competition.
If there are hundreds of DJs playing the same music, what makes you different from me? You find a new producer and say, "Let me play your music first. I'm not saying don't give it to anyone else, I'm saying don't give it to anyone else before me. El-B: A key producer and DJ in the transitional period between garage and dubstep, formerly part of garage duo Groove Chronicles.
0コメント