Seven years after the dust has settled on its final golden year, we are now approaching the 10th anniversary of dubstep; or, rather, the 10th anniversary of its ur-release, Digital Mystikz’ Dubsession, a.k.a. DMZ002. Binding the rootical electronica of 90s digidub to 2step’s floor-friendly urgency, DMZ002 consecrated an emergent sound nascent in the productions of Horsepower and the DJ sets of Hatcha and Youngsta. On tunes like “Jah Fire” and “Ten Dread Commandments,” the Mystikz submerged the slinky rhythms of UK garage in oily pools of reverb, slowing the tempo to a slimy skank punctuated by the whip-crack of snare-bursts masked in echo. Best of all, Loefah’s “Horror Show” — murky with the haze of reverb-soaked howls and backmasked moans — stripped away everything that made 2step such a sickly head-rush, leaving only a fibrillating sub-lo riff and filigree patterns of tightly-enveloped kicks and snares. A plaintive two-note hook occasionally strobes in the darkness, tugging at the consciousness like desperate rope signals from a subaquatic rave, but for the most part “Horror Show” is thrillingly physical:
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The final stages of a gurning comedown from the coke-sozzled delirium of 2step garage, Dubsession traced the outlines of a cavernous, futuristic dancehall from patterns of echo-space and bass-pressure. A renewed sense of the power of silence became possible in 2004, fired by sonic strategies of omission and distortion.
If these were uncharted waters, the idea of dubstep as a particular sound or genre washed up pretty quickly, leaving behind a fragmentary set of tendencies that continue to manifest unevenly across house/tech/pop boundaries. Dubstep’s frangible quality has been the secret to its endurance as something between a folk memory and a music genre. The word itself has become an empty vocable, drearily signifying, at the very least, electronic music with a prominent bass line. But despite the word being overused to the point of nonsense, it’s worth recalling that, for many producers, the discovery of dubstep was analogous to the discovery of a pocket of air beneath the deep freeze of mainstream reifications. Diverse outfits like Senking, Shackleton, Old Apparatus, Actress, and Machinedrum (etc., etc.) lack anything like a shared sound or style beyond a common ground in the space left behind by dubstep. It seems apt that a sound rooted in erasing and obscuring should be heard most clearly in the echoes left behind by its disappearance.