Dubstep Post #51,129

Some gossip from the messageboards: 1. there are tracks by Digital Mystikz, Kode 9, Random Trio and the Bug on the new Alfonso Cuaron film Children of Men. 2. excellent forward-thinking drum'n'bass label Inperspective are starting a dubstep sub-label called Inprint. The launch party is at Mass on October 7th.

Magda, make the tea!

Is there a single minimal techno DJ who doesn't have a gorgeous loft apartment with white walls? (cf. Ubercoolische)

Dummy Blog Album of the Week: 'The Roots of Dubstep' compiled by Ammunition and Blackdown

I wish I could say I'd been going to FWD ever since it started at the Velvet Rooms at 2001. Unfortunately back then I think I was just listening to The Bends over and over and over again. (I know I'm losing credibility here, but unless we have the odd anguished personal confession then there's no way this site is going to compete in a blog marketplace which is still ninety percent self-harming emo teenagers' Livejournals.) So I've got nothing but love for The Roots of Dubstep, which lets me pretend that I had any idea what dubstep was before Rephlex's (misnamed) Grime compilations came out in 2004. (Although I'm not sure when I'd actually have to pretend that. Maybe at a party. A really grim music journalists' party.)

Of course it doesn't sound much like dubstep does today, even though you'll spot familiar names like Skream, Benga and Digital Mystikz on the tracklist. This stuff (some of which is previously unreleased) is from around 2002/3, and no one had heard of halfstep back then. The phrase, really, is dark garage. You've still got the shuffled beats and smooth keyboards of classic two-step, but the punishing sub-bass, troubled dub landscapes, and general minimalism of later dubstep are beginning to creep in. Everything's instrumental apart from El-B's 'Buck and Bury' with Juiceman. My favourite track's probably Menta's 'Snake Charmer' with the Middle Eastern flute sample and grimey handclaps.

Tempa say that The Roots of Dubstep, co-compiled by Martin Clark aka Blackdown, 'is the only compilation to definitively document the early years of dubstep' – and I should note that while it may be the closest to definitive, it's certainly not the only compilation of its kind. Around the same time the Grime comps came out, I picked up the terrific Bingo Beats Volume 2 on DJ Zinc's label, which covers fairly similar ground without using any of the same tracks apart from Artwork's 'Red'. (The highlight is the unforgettable 'Said The Spider' by Darqwan, who seems to have found a new home on Storming Productions.)

The main problem with The Roots of Dubstep is that, unlike Bingo Beats, it's unmixed, which is nice for the DJs but also means that most of these tracks outstay their welcome (particularly DJ Abstract's 'Touch' at nearly nine minutes). A lot of them are still great, though, and not just as historical documents – in a way you've got the best of both worlds here, with garage's sinuous beats meeting dubstep's world-famous bass pressure. After Burial's LP came out, people were hoping it would inspire other dubstep producers to go back to those shuffled hi-hats, but I haven't seen much sign of that so far.

Remember, though, that there is still dubstep being made where you don't have to time to skin up between snares. The aforementioned Storming Productions and its sister label Destructive Recordings are still putting out dense, breaky dubstep of the highest calibre: listen to clips from their newest twelve inch, Elemental's 'Soulfire', here. And for more of this stuff, seek out their utterly amazing compilation Back to the Underground, which I must confess I still prefer to The Roots of Dubstep, Bingo Beats, Grime, or any of the Dubstep Allstars series.

7/10

Released 25/9 on Tempa.

Police and Thieves

I never thought I'd be linking to an article in the New Statesman on this blog, but then I also never thought I'd one day have to get a real job, so you just can't tell, can you? And even by New Statesman standards this article is brain-shrivellingly dull - it's a transcript of a round-table discussion by two-dozen music industry executives about copyright reform. But before you click back to that YouTube video of a Wisconsin teenager masturbating in time to Fergie's 'London Bridge', pause to consider that when that many record company stooges get together, the fate of the world is always in peril.

This time it's because they're talking about VRR. VRR stands for Value Recognition Right, and apparently the proposal is only about a month old. Now, of course I haven't read this article all the way through - I have better things to do - I, too, know what YouTube is - so I might be getting this wrong. But the idea seems to be as follows. DRM has failed, not so much because customers hate it - what does that matter? - but because it can always be circumvented by Scandinavian hackers. So where is the music industry's revenue going to come from? Well, lots of the bandwidth that ISPs sell is used to download illegal MP3s. Likewise, lots of the storage capacity that Apple sell inside their iPods is used to store illegal MP3s. So why not put a big levy on ISPs and MP3 player manufacturers?

Emma Pike, the Chief Executive of British Music Rights puts it as follows: '...rather than thinking: "These are our rights, let's try to find ways of enforcing them," why do we not try thinking: "This is how consumers want to get and share music. How can we adapt the copyright framework so that we can license that behaviour, thereby alleviating the aggravation that consumers are increasingly feeling towards copyright and, at the same time, making sure that we actually get paid when our music is shared?"'

In other words, the record companies have realised that, as Catherine Bell, director of rights at Chrysalis, says, 'Music to the consumer is like air. The consumer thinks it should be free... At the PRS you get all of these people saying: "It is a breach of my human rights that I should be asked to pay for this."'

Hang on. I don't download music illegally^[1]. Plus, even if I did, it wouldn't be music from the big record labels that want the VRR. And yet I'm still being asked to pay, effectively, a tax on my MP3 player and my broadband connection, in order to subsidise the law-breaking of a bunch of teenagers who get the new Christina Aguilera album off Limewire because they're too young to understand that anyone has ever paid for music!

I understand that the music industry is in an impossible position. And it's not just the big labels - lots of people argue that the reason grime hasn't got off the ground commercially is that its target audience are so addicted to illegal downloads. But surely there must be a solution that isn't so totally unfair on the very people, like me, that have supported the music industry so doggedly over the years by paying real cash for every single overpriced CD. 'Unless we get the government on our side to support [VRR], it is just a non-starter,' adds Catharine Bell. Let's hope the government have more sense than to support these people who have never shown anything but contempt for their customers.

[1] For the sake of argument, anyway. Seriously, practically never!

Competition Commission

Gawker Media, the people behind Gawker, Defamer, and nearly a dozen other top-notch blogs, have just launched a music blog called Idolator. Fit.

Brainy Like Gangsterz

You can download authorised preview copies of volumes 1 and 2 of Wiley's new 'Tunnel Vision' mixtape series here. I don't think I'd be exaggerating if I were to say 'Brap!'

Update: from a post by Logan Sama on the RWD forums:

'Just been told that Wiley has finalised his deal with Big Dada to release an album in 2007. It is currently tentatively scheduled for February 2007 and will be entitled "Playtime Is Over". Big Dada have said that they want Wiley to do an album that is free from commercial major label restraints and want to help him release a definitive Wiley LP without compromising his sound. Also he is going to take Tunnel Vision up to volume 10.'

OK now this is 'Brap!'-worthy if anything is.

We invented the remix

A nice way to waste five minutes from the DFA.

Dummy Blog Album of the Week: 'On Leaving' by Nina Nastasia

Run to Ruin, Nina Nastasia's last album, was a scary piece of work. Really scary. 'I'll cut you! I WILL CUT YOU!', that's what that album said.

The opening alone! 'We'll never talk about the thing we witnessed,' warned Nina Nastasia over dischordant cello and the distant funereal thump of a bass drum. You never found out what that thing was, and, dear God, you didn't want to. I can't think of a more arresting start to an album, and it only got worse – songs like 'On Teasing' and 'I Say That I Will Go' got bigger and bigger until they towered over you, blocking out the sun, ready to collapse. Sometimes Nastasia was getting drowned out by her own backing band, but she was always in control of the storm. This stuff was way heavier than any heavy metal, emotionally if not musically. Listening to it, I got visions of Southern Gothic – lynching and incest and cannibalism and plagues of locusts and bodies dumped out in the backwoods. No doubt the darkness in Nastasia's country/folk came from the soul, from everyday life, not from anything so crassly horror-movie – but there was something about her oblique, desperate lyrics that really fired the imagination.

So it's a shame, in a way, that with On Leaving she's retreated from that darkness. (For this, her fourth LP, she's switched from Touch & Go to Fat Cat Records, although Steve Albini is still producing.) It sounds not much like Run to Ruin but a lot like The Blackened Air and Dogs, her two albums before that; which means it's airy and quiet – mostly acoustic guitar and soft piano and brushed drums. Dylen Willemsa still does his unique off-key scraping thing on the viola, but there's very little cello or bass. And there's nothing scary about these songs – wistful and self-doubting and sad, but not scary. So no more Southern Gothic. Nastasia is still a truly beautiful songwriter, sure – listen to 'Brad Haunts A Party', with its contrast between the piano chords that rise and rise indomitably and the total resignation, reminiscent almost of Leonard Cohen, in the vocals - and that voice is still a wonder, sure, but, for me, three albums of this stuff is too much.

A quick Google search, however, reveals all. (Doesn't it always?) In an interview with Slug magazine, Nastasia says 'I have quite a few tracks that I don’t use from each album that are waiting to be placed on an appropriate record. This last recording we did I went into a studio and recorded all these songs that I had lying around that I haven’t documented and I recorded a lot of that stuff.' So that's why most of On Leaving sound like a step backward: it's old material. Which may actually be good news, because it shows that Run to Ruin wasn't necessarily a one-off. I certainly hope it wasn't, because its darkness was a new direction, and that's just what Nastasia needs. (Not counting 'The Matter of our Discussion', her shock collaboration with electronica producer Boom Bip, which somehow I doubt she's going to follow up.) You could compare Nastasia to Laura Veirs, who does a fairly similar folky thing and has that same kind of intimate cheerfulness that turns every so often to bitterness and aggression. But Veirs' work is so much more varied, both between songs and between albums.

So On Leaving certainly isn't a bad album. Considered on its own, it's a great one. But considered in context, it's just a little bit redundant. We've been here before.

7/10

Released 11/9 on Fat Cat Records.

DMZ, Mass, London, 2.9.06

The last time I was at DMZ, in March, was the night they switched to a bigger venue half-way through, which just could not be more symbolic. Everything was unstable then: even dubstep's kingpins had underestimated how fast the virus was spreading. Six months later, though, the infection is endemic - if you're susceptible, you're probably already suffering. The scene's settled down. No more shock of the new, no more new blood.

Still, great night. At one point Sergeant Pokes shouted to the 'quintuple crew'. At the time I had no idea what he meant, but it turns out that, unbelievably, DMZ was the fifth London dubstep events in three days: on Thursday there were nights at Redstar and Plastic People, and on Friday at Blackmarket and Plastic People again. So now you've got options, but the bass weight is still the most crushing at DMZ. For most of it I stood next to the speakers at the back and had my uvula undulated as never before. DMZ's found a (hopefully permanent) home in the second largest of St. Matthew's three spaces, which is, Goldilocks-style, just right: small enough that it never feels empty, big enough that you don't get fat queues all night.

Pinch, Digital Mystikz, Loefah and Youngsta all played predictably tight sets. Mystikz and Loefah B2B did the most for me simply because it was the least homogenous - quite a few vocal samples and conga lines and 4/4 kicks. I realise that even in the standard half-step plodders there's lots of baroque sound design, but most of that's lost when you're a foot from the speaker. Plus, is Skream the only producer these days making tunes that actually have tunes?

I'm reminded of eighties metal. Back then, nothing really mattered except the riff. It was like everyone was trying to find the Ultimate Supreme Perfect Riff. What would have happened if they'd actually found it? Maybe everyone would just have packed up and gone home. (Not an easy task when your drummer has a kit the size of a tire factory.) And sometimes it seems like dubstep's locked into a similar futile competition, except here people are using Cubase instead of electric guitars. And, guys, really, there's only so many things you can do with a square wave. At the rate that dubstep 12"s are coming out at the moment, they may have used up every possible bass line by about 2008, and what then?

Shallow Rave

You may have seen this article by Sarah Champion in last Sunday's Observer about the alleged rave revival. This is has nothing in common with the NME's 'neo rave' nonsense (a bandwagon lacking both a driver and wheels - feel free to parse that metaphor as you wish) except that both are basically empty journalistic concoctions. There's no evidence that raves ever went away - they just got smaller and more discreet. Actually, having only been to the odd little squat- and forest-clearing-based rave, I'm no expert, but all of the commenters beneath this post on the Observer blog seem to agree. They also confirm, depressingly, that raves have moved from hardcore and MDMA to psytrance and ketamine - not what I'd call progress. The most notable comment is by 'Tomtea' who says:

..this weekend numerous raves were shut down, often violently and with no section 63 excetera issued. The police had been issued with a zero tolerance command from the powers that be.

The reason? The guardian published an article a month or so ago claiming that multi-rigger so called 'megaraves' were planned across the country on a massive scale. Thhis weekend was just like any other, multiple small parties aceross the country...only this time the guardian whipped up a dreadful rumour that led to many casualties at essex and the army called in at wales. This is a direct result of the guardians 'megarave' claim.