Drums In The Deep

Ed Jenkins takes a look at the rise and rise of the nation’s heaviest sound…

When the UK garage clusterbomb peppered our capital with more splintered subgenres than you could shake a leg at, it might have seemed unlikely that the champagne froth of the 2-step phenomenon would pave the way for a new standard of brooding intensity in electronic music. But fast forward from those kaleidoscopic early days of the millennium and the mighty half-stepping weight of dubstep has emerged, alongside the angular anger of gobby twin brother grime, as the defining sound of early 21st century London.

The sound has even managed to break out into the national music mainstream, with Benga and Coki’s looped-out anthem ‘Night’ voted Track of the Year 2007 by Gilles Peterson’s Radio 1 listenership, and receiving c-list daytime airplay on woofer-free cafe radios the land over. No vocals. No guitars. Just blunted bleep hooks, cavernous lower frequencies and a slow, galloping skank. Housewives will never be the same again.

And, after years of turning away dubstep features and interviews in favour of PR machine pap, largely irrelevant publications such as NME and Observer Music Monthly have been furiously back-peddling towards the scene’s sailed ship, and are now practically tripping over each other to be the first to predict a Mercury Music Prize victory for the mysterious Burial and his rave graveyard sounds. Even mainstream movies have looked to capitalise on the music’s urban futurist feel, with the work of several major artists including Digital Mystikz and Kode 9 featuring in recent science fiction flick Children of Men.

So it’s unsurprising that FWD>>, dubstep’s legendary late-night breeding ground, has found a home at The End, the club having played a large part in the rise of other homegrown club scenes such as drum & bass and UK garage – themselves both part of the dubstep lineage. Youngsta, FWD>> resident and A&R for associated label Tempa, is excited to see things kick up a notch, with more regular events scheduled for 2008. “This will be our third night at The End, and we’ve had queues round the corner with the place packed out. The music’s been around for years now, but recently it’s been setting itself in stone – and if it’s going to be good business, then more clubs are going to want to be involved.”

Although anyone who has visited one of their events over the last seven years, since the early days at The Velvet Rooms to the now weekly parties at Plastic People, will tell you that the FWD>> movement has always been about more than just dubstep: the club night predates the genre’s development (at one point, proto-dubstep and some of its cousins were referred to by some as “the Forward sound”) and to this day remains a no-holds-barred shooting range for any number of potent bass strains.

“The whole FWD>> thing, without the waffle, is about good music,” Youngsta continues. “It isn’t strictly dubstep. It’s whatever’s new and exciting and cutting edge in our opinion. That’s what it’s been about, since the beginning with tunes like ‘138 Trek’ (seminal genre-straddling garage breaks anthem from junglist DJ Zinc) – that stuff was first played down FWD>>. We’ve still got grime going on there, and there’s house being played – we’ve been doing UK funky, this new dark funky house, and that’s cool. Whatever’s cool and new, we’re on.”

With or without influence from its ever-shifting sonic surroundings, dubstep has already explored a range of territories since finding its feet. From thugged-out floor-stompers and smoked-out roots grooves to stark sci-fi visions and hypnotic textural rollers, reinterpretations of the sound are marching out of whirring hard drives the globe over. Stalwart disc-spinner Plastician, who serves up both pile-driving dubstep and searing grime beats, is positive about the range of styles filling out the community. “I am interested to see how the diversity attracts people to different corners of the scene, and then how they will react to the other elements of the sound – how a first timer who'd been introduced to the sound by Burial would react to a set by somebody like N Type, Caspa or Rusko,” he wonders. “The great thing about the sound is its diversity, and I hope that people new to the movement will respect that and let the scene continue to morph into all kinds of interesting new styles.”

Plastician

A quick look online and you’ll find many less diplomatically-inclined views on the diversity – or lack of it – in the spotlight, with many worrying that the scene’s milestone mainstream moments thus far (two Essential Mix spots and a Fabriclive album) paint a picture of dubstep’s future as an ever-gurgling soup of LFO distortion and samples from Danny Dyer films. Weary of self-fulfilling backlashes, and keen not to jinx a perfectly healthy community, the scene’s ambassadors are remaining positive in the face of this potential popular bias.

“I think so long as the quality of the music stays high, then the public's conceptions or anything the mainstream media makes up about the music will not have an effect on the growth of the scene,” continues an optimistic Plastician, who himself was snubbed by Radio 1 when his weekend grime and dubstep show was axed in favour of a ‘nu-rave’ residency from Kissy Sell Out (whether replacing an underground show with a man named ‘Sell Out’ was considered to be some kind of hilariously ironic double-bluff by the BBC’s day-glo adorning fortysomethings has yet to be confirmed). And it’s this sense of optimism amongst dubstep’s hardest working that inspires hope for the future of this ever-expanding community.

“I think people watch things a bit closely sometimes and need to let them breathe more. I never go and check sites or forums,” warns Youngsta with regards to negative online chatter. “But [the scene] could get a bit misled. If newcomers only hear a certain sound all the time, they might think that’s all that dubstep has to offer. And if all the big DJs decide to start playing a certain sound, then people will disappear.” Comparisons with the dominance of inane jump-up that has suffocated many big room drum & bass nights are hard to avoid. ”I get given music from people who are clearly just trying to make some money out of the new big thing – you can tell from their sound. Whether you’re a veteran or a newcomer, you can’t be trying to fake something to jump on a bandwagon.”

“It’s a bit blatant,” agrees Jamie from Vex’d, the darkside tag-team who forged their own caustic, industrial sound from out of early dubstep’s molten heart. “Qualitative judgements go out the window and it's more important to be part of all the hype. The name has a lot of currency at the moment so everyone wants to call everything ‘dubstep’. We've only done like two or three real dubstep tunes – we're not really that dubstep. But the press are just trying to catch up, and that's good. Some very talented people have been working hard at this for a long time, and they're finally getting recognition.”

Even the towering worlds of house and techno have felt the impact of the dubstep drop. Chameleonic electro playboy Damien Lazarus recently signed a devastating tune from Shackleton, whose excursions into hypnotic percussion and mountainous bass tower over the listener like monolithic fantasies in speaker fetishism, a complete break from the sleek synthy smut typified by label Crosstown Rebels’ normal output. Another Shackleton tune, the mesmerising ‘Blood On My Hands’, received DJ support and an award-winning remix from Chilean minimal guru Ricardo Villalobos, opening up a new area of this new sound to a new audience – chiefly German techno heads whose love of chic abstractions and neo-narcotic soundscapes are a world away from the trigger-finger-flailing rewind madness more closely associated with dubstep’s origins.

Bristolian beatsmith Headhunter, who counts the techno-fuelled vibes of Peverelist and 2562 amongst his favourite emerging sounds, sees the two as natural bedfellows. “Most of my tracks are inspired by minimal, and my sets now contain a few minimal tracks when the time is right. I’ve even started making the stuff.” He’s recently been teaming up for dubstep outings with a fellow local techno lover, drum & bass’ warhead merchant Tech Itch – far from the only junglist to have tried to find breathing space in amongst the half-steps. From long-serving legends such as Digital to more recent international players like Juju, it seems dubstep is stealing more than just the punters from its over-bloated older brother.

But Youngsta sees the long-serving scene as more of an aspirational blueprint than a warning sign. “Drum & bass is cutting edge but it can still hit chart positions and be a bit more universal – Shy FX has had several tunes in the charts,” he reminds the cynical. “I hope dubstep can maintain its underground depth as well as being more commercial. There are some extremely diverse artists coming through – like we’ve got this guy Seven on Tempa – who can aim to hit all those bases. Anyway, I think people are a bit closed minded with drum & bass. If you search hard enough, there’s always good stuff going on.”

Youngsta

And it’s all about the search, as anyone who emerged from music history’s largest spike of genre names (4x4, bassline, grime, eski, sublow, breakstep etc) clutching dubstep to their rattled chests will tell you. With the sparse sound remaining somewhat of an undefined quantity, with its 2-step bloodline proving a recurring influence, and with its potential subgenres crossing over into almost every area of electronic music, there’s no telling where a good search through the dense undergrowth of dubstep might lead today’s listener. “I think we'll soon be enjoying dubstep-esque sounds which are not constrained to 140 bpm,” reckons Plastician, looking ahead. “If dubstep is a taste of things to come, things are only going to get more diverse and twisted in the future!”

Other underground circuits such as niche (chipmunk-friendly bassline garage popularised up north) and streetbass (ghettotech breaks from the US) are already dominating dancefloors further afield from dubstep’s London heartbeat, so it’s surely only a matter of time before returning ravers climb aboard our city’s nightbuses and whisper about a new sound while their Skream ringtones fire away in the background. ”There are loads of other things happening: dubstep is just more developed than those things at the moment – it's been developing for many years,” reminds Jamie Vex’d. “And electronic music is several decades deep now. We've gone through this cycle so many times, and nothing stays modern forever. But it is happening, right now, so just go out and enjoy it.”

FWD>> at The End is on Feb 22nd, and is in association with Rinse FM www.rinse.fm

Published: 18/02/2008

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