Night 18340 (the Insomniac mix)

To my hoards of readers, thanks for waiting. For weeks, I’ve been immersed in the world of Electronic music, considering the role of the sublime in art, defoliating my blight-ridden tomatoes, amid a host of other blog-smothering activities. Last time I was here in front of you all, I was wondering about the Electronic influences of Southwold painter, Marc Brown. I’d discovered The Field and Murcof and bemused myself at the starry array of sub-genres within the Electronic fold, of which Techno is but one sliver. Now, I can say I’m more experienced. The Quinq has been places in his mind he didn’t know existed. And, sitting on the patio of my long lost friend, Rog, in Nottingham last Saturday evening, I was minded to describe my new found love for the winning Electronic genre of our times, Dubstep, sometimes known as Electronic Dub. I’ve found that you can tell someone you like Electronic, but, although they may be a fellow devotee, they may not have heard of the artists you can name. There are as many artists as there are sub-genres. I had to step back in time to pull up 70s Dub Reggae as the continuum here. Had King Tubby, Lee Perry and Augustus Pablo had this technology at their disposal, what might they have achieved? For me, with the eclipse of Reggae in the 80s at the hands of Rap and Hip-Hop, and with the impenetrable ugliness of most Dancehall, it’s a joyful relief to hear the re-emergence of Dub, albeit in a darker guise as a sub-genre of Electronic. No longer a purely black music preserve, Dub is, in its new Electronic form, susceptible to the influence of many formats, from Ambient to House and even Nu-Jazz. Now, I get to combine best of three worlds I’ve loved – Dub, Electronic and the dark night noise that characterised some of the Post-Punk era, including A Certain Ratio and Joy Division. And nary a guitar in earshot. Dubstep has been a long time coming. When XTC tried dubbing their music with a freebie inclusion to their second album, Go2+, nobody picked up on the excellence. Andy Partridge himself hated it and moved on to become the hippy he really wanted to be. But it’s all collected together in the wonderfully titled Explode Together – The Dub Experiments 1978-80. A step up from German bands like Can, 23 Skidoo championed an anarchic ambient noise that I hear in Dubstep way back in the early 80s. Check out their Seven Songs LP from 1982. Everything was moving away from Reggae and towards Rap and Rave. Apart, that is, from New Order, whose own dub experiments were a world apart (but, then, as a band, they were a world apart in the 80s). But now it’s time for Dubstep. The Garage, 2-Step and Grime influences of Dubstep seem to have passed me by, but the new sound has caught me by the hairs on the back of my neck. Oh, I can’t follow any of the 140 beats per minute technicality of it all. But I do know it incorporates elements of music I like, including Dub – if not the Reggae beat, then the sound effects. One of these days, I will discover Lee Scratch Perry up to no good in the thick of it. Dubstep may well be a technique, but it’s an atmosphere, a layered sound collage that induces a feeling, moving from the spaced-out to the edgy. I even hear it in the 80s German film music of Nikos Mamangakis, particularly Die Zweite Heimat. Whether it’s Burial, Skream, Pinch, Distance, Starkey, DJ T or 2562, it seems there’s a time for listening to Dubstep – a few minutes either side of 3 o’clock in the morning. Dubstep is your inner soundtrack, your personal sonic dreamscape, the sound your memories make. Dubstep is a surprise encounter with a recollection, just around the corner from your heartbeat. Dubstep is a pause in the sentence you use to describe your life. Dubstep is an echo of something you meant to say. Dubstep is your shadow demanding to be heard. Dubstep is a tacit understanding between an insomniac and a nightwalker. Dubstep is a crepuscular exchange at the edge of your world. Dubstep is reaching out to something just beyond your fingertips. Quite alien at first, Dubstep can sound very familiar after just a couple of listenings. But then, the Quinq is close to any form of expression that’s just below the pavement. When I listen to this kind of music I can sense people walking overhead on the world of surface. And, like the track from DJ T’s perfectly entitled album, The Inner Jukebox, I feel I’m Lit From Within. So that the imagery I see is on the back of my eyelids. Yes, as much as I like The Field and Gui Boratto and the lighter side of electronic, in Dubstep I think I’ve found what I was looking for. With my limited exposure to date, I’m assuming that Burial has truly defined Dubstep in his two albums. It is a dark mood, a Dickensian fog enshrouding the Thames, but very definitely a backdrop for humanity. All breathy heartbeats and footsteps, voices in puddles, one song seeping into the next. Amplified for every glitch, the background becomes the foreground - what I used to hear in the ante-room of The Smiths, A Certain Ratio, Joy Division, Pet Shop Boys and even Neil Young. Personally, I don’t care whether Murcof fails to make the list of Dubsteppers. The album from this Mexican, Martes, evokes the same mood in me as Untrue by Burial. It doesn’t matter that Amon Tobin and Craig Taborn cannot make the Dubsteppin cut, because their albums Bricolage and Junk Magic give me the same feed as Underwater Dancehall by Pinch or My Demons by Distance. Dubstep only really works as a thematic collection of songs – which is why some albums, like Skream! by Skream, don’t cut it as an entirety and are less than the sum of their parts. But since you asked for a sample of Dubstep, The Quinq is only too happy to oblige with 10 up…

Burial Near Dark from Untrue album
Distance My Demons from My Demons album
DJ T Lit From Within from The Inner Jukebox album
Ezekiel Honig Broken Marching Band from Surfaces Of A Broken Marching Band album
Modeselektor The White Flash feat. Thom Yorke from Happy Birthday! album
Pinch Widescreen from Underwater Dancehall album
Skream Kut-Off from Skream! album
Starkey Time Traveler from Ephemeral Exhibits album
Swayzak Distress And Calling from Some Other Country album
2562 Techno Dread from Aerial album

Quite clearly, in order to get a handle on the future of Dubstep, I’m going to have to walk backwards into Grime, 2-Step and Garage, its forbears. Watch and hear this space.

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk