And like a steppin razor don't you touch their sides: they're dangerous. Dangerous.
It's been a while eh?
Well, the barely-suffused office angst has faded and I'm here to talk about something quite pleasant, for a change of pace.
Over the past 10 years or so I’ve become progressively enthralled with all forms of electronic music. The hard adolescent edge of my punk and metal years having dulled a bit, I turned to other styles for the sake of variety and freshness. And quite a journey it’s been: From the abrasive textures of industrial/noise, the hopeful melancholy of EBM, to the simple, organic visceral joy of house and expressive, uplifting trance, tribal-yet-robotic Detroit techno, groovy, empowering hip hop and landing most recently upon my shores with the infectious energy of breakbeat and its many many many descendants.
Recently I’ve been slowly but surely discovering the expanding world of dubstep.
Let me say I’ve been bitten by the bug. Hard. My blood pulses to the 2step beat of a deep drum and tingles with the scattered triplety-syncopated high-hats and tiny shuffled percussion-cells of the dubstep beast-thing. It’s a wonderful feeling. I want more of this substance.
And…
I’m a sucker for wobbly bass. (Whoop-whoop-wob-wob-wob-bwa-bwa-bwa but I digress) Okay, so it’s a bit overused, it still sounds killer if it’s well done. LFOs need some love too.
Nowadays, dubstep is actually an umbrella term covering a very diverse range of styles. The genre is more than old enough for its participants to branch out and create some wildly innovative tracks while remaining in the same broad category. For a genre that originated with the practice of producing weird b-sides/remix/redubs of more successful garage and drum&bass tracks, it’s surely come a long way since.
I already have a bunch of favourites.
Distance bears its name well. It’s very ambient, very cool. The music has that dark, urban, jazzy kind of Blade Runner feel that just won’t let go until you actually begin to feel the acid rain falling on your head as the neon signs glow and you’re looking for Rachel. It’s great. It’s profound. It tugs at the heartstrings.
Kode9 and the SpaceApe make one hell of a duo. I remember seeing them live at the Mutek festival in Montréal one year (I was volunteering for them at the end of my sound studies) and didn’t even know what they did was dubstep. The announcers simply referred to their act as ‘spoken word’… sheesh. Hearing them on album now is a much different animal than it was back then in a live setting, but the mood is very poignant still. The music is dope and the lyrics are playfully deep.
Burial’s approach has me completely amazed. Unlike just about everyone else in the electronic music world, he works (nearly) entirely in Soundforge, which means no generic synth programming and without a sequencer. It’s all collaged together in some sort of weird witch's brew that doesn’t cease to surprise the listener. As a result, the music is beautiful, haunted, minimal but by no means reduced. The mix is straight, and the appearance of a lack of polish only serves to enhance the sounds themselves. The ‘no sequencer’ thing is very refreshing. I imagine this guy would have a legion mashup artists lining up at his door for tips & tricks if only this single fact were more advertised.
Pendulum, a personal drum & bass classic, has begun its first forays into the shadowy world of dubstep. So far so good. While the examples available are never exactly what I would call ‘full-on dubstep’, the elements they mesh into their music are recognizable and add a new interesting. dimension to some of the best tracks on their latest offering, Immersion. Since crossover is the mainstay appeal of Pendulum’s music, I say these new dubstep-inspired ideas are on par for the course.
***
Dubstep is usually played in the 136-142-bpm range, though as is often the case, this rule is easily broken. Not too long ago, I was reading about the emergence of the Funky scene in London (at least that’s what it’s called now, you know how that goes) which is a bit of an evolution on the whole thing, but dropping things down to a smooth ~130-bpm and incorporating latin beats. It sounds attractive and I definitely have to check that out.
Electronic music is very often a very ‘live your music’ experience, enjoying spur-of-the-moment developments and necessitating a local scene to flourish (think Detroit techno, Goa Trance or UK Garage as easy-to-grok examples). I am not much of a club-goer, and therefore can rarely be considered an early adopter of any specific genre. When interesting musical news reach me, the wave is usually passed and the particular scenes of interest have moved on to new sonic adventures. Not that I’m phased by all that, it just means my patience is rewarded with each listen, and there’s always something else coming up.
In this sense, music is a meme which spawns divers offspring of divers colours. It just keeps growing and spreading. I love it.
