and from one black sheep of the postrave family to another....

Leaving Earth with a top 10 list of Wobble Records

and he's not talking about circa-2006-halfstep-wobble-when-it-was-good

he's talking filthstep, grosstep, abjectionstep, vomstep

his  first choice for the top 10 "immortal wobble objects for posterity" =

Leaving Earth's mysterious Taninian opines, persuasively:

"The wobble aesthetic now seem to be fusing with electro house, to form a new all purpose rave music, much like punk rawness/intensity eventually ended up as a part of a wider “real rock” sensibility in the eighties. It’s all about the Skrillex/ Deadmau5-axis, of course, and while Deadmau5 doesn’t seem all that exciting to me, Skrillex is actually pretty good. Sure, he might not have that many tricks up his sleeve so far....  but he’s nevertheless really good at using wobbles potential for catchiness and dynamics, redefining it to meet his own ends. It would be tempting to go all the way and see him as some sort of, I dunno, dubstep's Sex Pistols, but ... perhaps something like Metallica is probably a better comparison."

At the MTV Movie Awards the other night, the warm-up deejay Martin Solveig was dropping nonstop wobble (the Skrillexy maximalist wibble-tendril type, rather than Stenchman-style diarrhea-step, but still)  to the assembled celebritati and industry people.


Then, in that comedy skit taking the piss out of Emma Stone before she got her "Trailblazer" Award, where the mirth-premise was that in real life she's a horrible arrogant unsweetheart, one of the faux-nasty comments from Mila Kunis was "Emma says she invented dubstep"

So it really has crossed over.

Or at least it will have done, completely, when Skrillex or Deadmau5 or something similar replaces the rockor mortis of moments like Johnny Depp guest riffing with the Black Keys.

Back to the Leaving Earth list--which inexplicably is unaccompanied by YouTubes, I expect he expects you to search out and buy these records -- reading it I found myself wondering whether the actual tunes could possibly live up to descriptions such as these:

"the EP [Tomba's Brace For Impact] excels at the 'grunt-step” wobble variety, like a horde of towering, Godzilla-sized pig-robots marching through a nocturnal megapolis, crushing everything in their way while puking out cascades of green ooze through writhing hydraulic cyber-snouts"

It does actually


Another of Leaving Earth's choices: Doctor P's "Gargoyles"

All this metal-ic grotesquerie-imagery reminds me of that notion I mooted a few years back: wobblestep (d)evolving towards a kind of slowed-down gabba...

so maybe the dungeon style of dubstep is the "intelligent"/ambient/atmospheric version of that -- equivalent to gloomcore? 

Macabre Unit as a label name -- how gloomcore is that?


more from the Leaving Earth list: