the genre known as dubstep - search and destroy

doorstep

approved

xpost - I mean you can read that into the review if you think overtones of IDM are a bad thing, but for the readership I don't think that's the case at all; describing Hyperdub as "head music" is probably the best way you can get the pitchfork readership to actually investigate.

Also I do lol at how people now seem to associate "wonky" with reynolds. Next we'll have to disavow "uk funky" because he once talked about it.

Pitchfork's still doing the thing where they have a blanket idea that most music outside of their main view is dumb, except for the token artists/albums/subgenres that they've wisely picked through for their readers. I haven't seen a review this shallow in a while, but maybe it's because it didn't get thrown to one of their pet genre writers.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^x a milli

doorstep

approved

as manara said the other week, naughtystep needs to happen

my feelings about dubstep, and this comp, are that at its best it's somewhat psychedelic, deep, and playfully creative. at it's worst it's got a cheap, eurotrashy feel to it i can't stand. i'm sure that people who know way more about dubstep than me could pick out great songs from the latter, but so far i can't see myself really digging it. listening to 5 years and there's a pretty solid leaning towards the former, most of which i think are relatively newer. so given this extremely limited history of the genre, i like where things are going.

Considering you can't actually dance to dubstep (last time I saw any dubstep on a dancefloor was a week ago and it really was mostly blokes standing in a room doing the vigorous head nodding thing) I think that review is pretty generous. I mean, short of getting on his knees and fellating Kode9 what more do you want him to do?

i definitely remember manara and i wining our waists last week? lots of socaerobics moves being busted

one of the best bits of the comp is when joker & ginz's "stash" busts out that eurotrashy synth riff

I think it's more that dubstep's Big Serious Face is so ripe for mockery that's it's amusing to watch people getting annoyed because Big Serious Indie Website isn't treating it with the expected degree of reverence.

dubstep is most certainly danceable. benga and skream dj'd at piknic electronic a month and a half ago and lord knows what all of our collective hips were doing if it ain't called dancing.

i don't think dubstep really has a Big Serious Face any more, and from what i gather the annoyance isn't b/c of the lack of reverence but b/c of the general (xpected) rongness.

You can dance very well to dubstep but it has to be over a decent sound system, it doesn't work without a wall of vibrating bass. Having said that, loads of (what I consider crap) dubstep isn't any good to dance too - the wobble stuff like Caspa for example.

And, again, having said all this, the dubstep I like is more on the European tech side of things.

Maybe (strawman alert) you need to be a good dancer/enjoy dancing to dance to Dubstep unlike your average Pitchfork reviwer/reader.

the whole "you can't dance to dubstep" thing is a bit boring to hear when you've seen dancing at dubstep raves about a hundred times but I think it's still got some mileage to go before I start sbing for it.

Also Benga and Skream djing nowadays = atrocious and everything that is wrong with dubstep. Altho Benga on his own and Benga's productions are still ok.

seeing Skream a couple of weeks ago in Glasgow play some tunes that sounded like slightly pitched down gabba and then playing back to back La Roux remixes, and rewinding them iirc, then going into some bait d'n'b for a while was the confirmation of the fact that he has fallen right the fuck off, if any more evidence was needed.

and there was a lot of dancing going on.

I mean, short of getting on his knees and fellating Kode9 what more do you want him to do?

There are three paragraphs out of eight about the actual songs on the compilation at the end, an opening one that doesn't really contextualize anything, two that try to generally describe the sound of the label (one through metaphor, one through quotes), and one that tries to define the compilation as a mission statement. The first couple are really about dubstep at large, but then he reverses to say that hyperdub isn't really a dubstep label.

the whole "you can't dance to dubstep" thing is a bit boring to hear when you've seen dancing at dubstep raves about a hundred times

or when you used to hear the same thing about jungle. i just interpret it as "I can't dance to it" tho.

Obviously you can dance to dubstep, but anything in the halfstep mode in particular does seem to encourage crowds to do a fairly awkward sway-n-bob maneuver, in addition to shouting in cod-jamaican accents at the DJ for a rewind ("Wheel and come again my friend!" etc).

This is a problem with people rather than the music though, I think - I've seen variations of the same bad dancing at different tempos at jungle nights and at hip hop nights , it's just concentrated at dubstep nights. I think probably most people just don't have much of a clue of how to dance to stuff that isn't underpinned by a 4X4 groove.

ha ha x-post.

dancing in the uk is really upper body focused across all genres (sadly)

sometimes you wonder whether people realise they have hips

Riverdance really put people off legwork

Perhaps the other issue is that a lot of this crowd just aren't big on dancing properly. They're not steeped in a tradition of dancing-as-courtship, which I think is what lifts the standard at say house and R&B nights so substantially above almost anything else. So in the absence of some kind of raveXdrugs vector everything becomes very beery and bleary. Again, it's certainly not a trend unique to dubstep.

Ha there was a thread a while back where table is the table was complaining that gay clubs seem to be more about dancing in order to score or dancing as an adjunct to drug taking rather than being "about the music", and I thought "sure, but that's what makes good dancing a more serious proposition at gay clubs..."

British people should not be allowed to use their hips when dancing. It would be disgusting in 99% of cases.

Actually by disgusting I mean more 'rubbish and foolish looking'.

^ traitor to the crown

Also Benga and Skream djing nowadays = atrocious and everything that is wrong with dubstep. Altho Benga on his own and Benga's productions are still ok.

i admit i had a bit more fun during benga's set, was really drunk at the time, and that i am basically the furthest thing from a dubstep or just general dance music snob as it gets, but man u crazy. it was as big of a booty blaster as i've ever seen. but what do i know? dubstep is so scarce in montreal, i'm probably just so starved that even "everything that is wrong with dubstep" sounds like gold to my ears.

can someone give me some good dubstep songs because i've been trying to get into it, but i don't really know what to get. i was considering getting run the road but i wasn't sure how similar grime and dubstep are,thanks

blackout crew - put a donk on it

xp u r on the dubstep thread, dude

xxpost They're very different Fack.

I'm a dubstep grinch of course but Silkie's City Limits Vol. 1 is one of my favourite albums of the year:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiPHMe0_a-w

yeah that album is great. i'm lovin' the more straight up 2step/proto-dubstep sounding stuff coming out now (sully comes to mind, i guess)

I recently saw Benga DJ and left after 30mins. Several major problems.

1. Annoying chucklefuck MC saying stupid shit like 'lets hear it for the Benga' over an over and over and over and over and over and over
2. Benga has exactly 1 trick. Perfectly beatmatched wobbles that come slamming in at the right time. Initially this was very cool, after realizing that was all he was going to play and all he was capable of doing, I walked out.
3. Did I mention the stupid MC and the complete lack of variation in Benga's track selection?
4. Fuck the wobble and fuck the peeps who think halfstep wobblers are awesome. This is the same thing that happened with Drum and Bass and if Dubstep 'dies' like DnB did, you can attribute its demise to people like Benga who go for lowest common denominator stuff and only play wobblers.

^^^ Agree with this but query whether/why you're surprised? Hasn't this been true of mainstream dubstep for about three years now? i.e.:

god are these guys actually going for the "drop" aesthetic? DID DRUM AND BASS TEACH YOU NOTHING??
― acid waffle house (dubplatestyle), Tuesday, January 30, 2007 4:44 PM (2 years ago) Bookmark

I've heard some great stuff from Benga. I liked a bit of Diary of An Afro Warrior and expected him to play some uptempo tracks too. I wouldn't have gone if I knew he was going to stick to dropping wobblers the whole night.

This new Sully single is great, both sides - so pretty and groovy and eerie. Sully's stuff always makes me wonder why dubstep spent five years or so obstinately not going there, when it's so obviously a great sound:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVncwp1y3VQ&feature=related

ha...i hardly ever go to dubstep nights but i saw 2562 a few weeks ago and one of my overriding impressions was that lots of the dancing looked really awkward. but even that was kinda charming in a way, seeing ppl figure it out as they went along. not much experimental dancing going on at house/techno nights!

i think rather than 'cant dance to it' its more like 'dont enjoy dancing to it' -- dancing to this stuff feels like a chore imo

that sully track is amazing, and fits totally into the "post-dubstep" stuff i've been mentioning - it'd fit on the hyperdub comp with no problems

tim you say you're a "dubstep grinch" but i remain confused as to which kind of dubstep you're grinching about, or whether it's just the more nebulous idea of a dubstep club strawscene with strawboys not dancing well? not that there isn't an element of that, sadly, but it's...not something to get hung up on. the stuff i'm really excited about - ikonika, joker, guido, zomby, subeena, brackles, bok bok, shortstuff - can mostly only be called dubstep b/c it emerged out of it. dubstep itself is now that lairy macho caspa/rusko bullshit that feels like someone's vomiting in your face.

re: dancing, it's best to dance to when mixed up with other stuff - i've never been into a whole night of samey dubstep sounds and tempos.

^^yes totally this. the most fun i've had dancing to dubstep was when kode9 (lol) played here and even then it just got boring after a couple of hours of relentless half-time beats.

i just cant stand the bass melodies ... they're so ham-handed & riff-y ... & its like "oh i like dubstep that doesnt sound like that" except i feel like thats like liking rap except for the rapping or something

tim you say you're a "dubstep grinch" but i remain confused as to which kind of dubstep you're grinching about, or whether it's just the more nebulous idea of a dubstep club strawscene with strawboys not dancing well? not that there isn't an element of that, sadly, but it's...not something to get hung up on. the stuff i'm really excited about - ikonika, joker, guido, zomby, subeena, brackles, bok bok, shortstuff - can mostly only be called dubstep b/c it emerged out of it. dubstep itself is now that lairy macho caspa/rusko bullshit that feels like someone's vomiting in your face.

Well Lex you kinda answer your own question: "Why do you say you dislike dubstep when there are so many artists I wouldn't even describe as "dubstep" that are so great??"

Kinda crappy halfstep nights with bad dancing constitute both a "strawscene" and really-existing-dubstep - I have quite a few friends who are into a kind of venn diagram of dubstep, minimal, deep house, detroit techno, the-music-formerly-known-as-wonky and... let's call it "Fact Music" for the purposes of this conversation (Bok Bok, Cooly G, Joy Orbison, etc.).

All the actually-marketed-as-dubstep-nights I go to with this group sound like the strawscene, if you avoid them then good for you but that doesn't mean that this scene is fictional - anymore than repetitive aggro d&b becomes fictional if you obstinately listen to only Offshore or D:A:T Music style d&b.

And I think the attempt to draw some simple line between "post-dubstep" on the one hand and caspa/rusko on the other is a bit distorting. It ignores not only the whole Apple Pips/Hessle Audio/Tectonic/etc. end of the scene, but also the vast majority of what I'd call "proper dubstep", comprised of a huge number of artists that can be really good and interesting (mala, quest and silkie, for example, are all "proper dubstep", but also excellent), okay but inconsistent (skream, loefah, goth-trad to pick a random example) and outright bad to mediocre (benga, distance).

It's convenient to pretend that caspa/rusko invented halfstep wobblers but in truth they're merely the most egregious practitioners.

But anyway I called myself a dubstep grinch because I don't like enough of the scene as a whole to expect people to take my recommendations seriously. If I wrote a review of a dubstep album or comp for Pitchfork I'd almost certainly get accused of being sneering and arrogant in my assumption that I'd identified the only dubstep worth liking (in fact that is precisely the "fanmail" I got for my review of the first Burial album!).

X-post to Deej

Dancing to Mala, its like Theo seriously. Effortless movement. So natural.

Dancing is my life, its all I do outside work and music.

But I hear you when it comes to the metal influenced end. It is totally riff based headbanger music, which is totally my past. I lived in Milwaukee for 2 years, metal everywhere. Hard to escape it really.

I'm willing to acknowledge that this could be a permanent bias for me, I'm really a lot like Chuck.

Still trying to make metal and disco work together, suspect it'll never happen.

Loefah is kind of hard to pin down Tim.

Its like: crap, obviously early work, GODLIKE GENIUS, silence, AWESOME BUT NOT GODLIKE, silence.

Some of those early dubs in 2005, man they were dark. Particularly the Crackbong remix.

Its like echo chamber electro, truly Antarctic cold.

I think you pretty much got the scene nailed though, other than forgetting Untold's label Hemlock.

The scene just isn't up to your standards, I respect that. Its increasingly not up to mine.

Its all about the Locked On to DMZ's Metalheadz. Haven't found that yet, we're close though now.

It ignores not only the whole Apple Pips/Hessle Audio/Tectonic/etc. end of the scene

it totally includes this end! untold, ramadanman etc.

I think it's more that dubstep's Big Serious Face is so ripe for mockery that's it's amusing to watch people getting annoyed because Big Serious Indie Website isn't treating it with the expected degree of reverence.

otm. esp when its kode 9 and hyperdub. you would almost expect a site like p4k to laud this and ignore other straighter dubstep as this is more home listenable, more left of centre, etc etc, so its funny that they havent. though im now wondering if theyre going to start raving about the wobble guys. i do like dubstep but for a long time it did take itself far too seriously. not even the artists, just the actual music. i do like various tracks but theres quite a few old ones that still sound wanky. the new ones just sound repetitive and samey but at least theres a bit of energy to it. (if not bass, the main thing that was great about dubstep)

i guess my position is that i've always been vaguely into dubstep, but it's only the post-dubstep stuff which makes me really enthusiastic about it as a scene

tim have you heard subeena yet? "boksd" and "solidify" in partic.