a decade of postdubstep

Was thinking the other day, it's been ten years - more or less, give or take - of postdubstep

And was wondering "where's it at now, then?"

And also "what did it amount to?"

Here's a compilation, on Bristol's Timedance label, and a review of it (by Philip Sherburne), that provides some answers




I like this track a lot:





Phil places the comp in the company of "iconic UK label documents" such as Warp’s Artificial Intelligence, Mo Wax’s Headz, and Night Slugs Allstars Volume 1" - all of which he says were "surveys of a landscape in flux, less repositories for an established sound than catalysts for a new upheaval".

Weeeeeell, the first two of those, I always thought, were actually pretty patchy compilations - although they certainly captured a Moment, it's true.

Phil identifies two aspects of the state-of-art that I think are true (and that I feel as deficiencies)

1/ a deficit of anthems.

As he writes, "Chekov’s clattering “Stasis 113”... is the only real club anthem here" .



I'm not sure I would agree that even that qualifies as an anthem to be honest - it's got a strident beat, yes - but you need more than that to achieve anthem-hood.  Anthems - think 2BM "Bombscare," Renegade "Terrorist," Double 99 "Ripgroove"  - are purpose-built to massive-fy a dancefloor. They contain embedded behavioral cues that trigger synchronised crowd responses; they appeal to the crowd-as-body.  Postdubstep tracks, when I listen to them, I don't picture a scene, a social tableau.

2/ a deficit of definition.

Phil rolls out the potted history ("the story of UK dance music is a story of mutation: of soundsystem culture and breakbeat hardcore colliding to create jungle and drum ’n’ bass; of American house that spawned its mutant UK garage; of the darkside 2-step that would morph into dubstep, that (briefly) world-conquering sound that rampaged like a world-conquering robot") as set-up for the inevitable pivot to the "2010s be different times" argument (i.e. we've moved past the era of genres and scenes):

"But aside from a few exceptions—specialist subgenres like UK funky, drumstep, and bassline house, also sometimes known, fittingly enough, as “niche”—the UK hasn’t generated many new styles in the past decade. That doesn’t mean that the process of evolution has hit a wall; it has just diversified and diffused. Instead of yielding distinct, readily identifiable rhythmic signatures, club music’s innovations have become restless, reinventing themselves at every turn. Seeking new ground across an expanded array of tempos, cutting-edge club music has poured its energy into shape-shifting textures and timbres. It’s a tough time for those of a taxonomical bent, but a golden age for listeners who like to be surprised at every turn."

Ha, yes, that's me for sure - "of a taxonomic bent". Definitely!

But more importantly I'm of a wanting to be shocked, brocked, shaken - and then, much later, stirred to write a thinkpiece about it ;) 

I mean this tune...



It's good -  I didn't feel like I'd wasted 7 minutes of my life afterwards. But I don't hear anything in it that feels 20-years-in-advance of Optical's "To Shape The Future." The production is more detailed and more spatially contoured. But that's just 20 years of upgrades innit?




So for me, it's been ten years of diffusion (as Phil writes) but also of defusion - as in a bomb being defused.



But I know there are others who disagree...  who are trying to formulate this postpostdubstep moment, write up it as an adventure.

And everybody deserves a shot at making their own time seem and feel like an adventure.

Good luck to them.

Leaving Earth's Taninian with a counter view of UK bass, or as he prefers, post-step, to that  argued by Musings's Dominic /Datwun

(it's a follow-up to a much earlier  this year post on post(dub)step - dude posts irregularly but at great length and depth when he does)

these two posts add up to a surprising ideological swerve (basically embracing the Harper/Muggs position) from a chap who even earlier (May) last year was enthusing so infectiously and authoritatively about wobble...  but then again I suppose there's no rule that you have to pick sides between brostep and post(dub)step - indeed while ideologically I'm firmly on the wobble-bro side, in terms of day to day listening I probably listen more to the post_ stuff (but as I said in the earlier post here, that's because it's more compatible with the way I use music, maybe)

still I hope he won't disappoint me further by penning encomiums to vapidwave and cloud rap ;)


To the claims ventured in the latest post, on behalf of the post-....      

the parallel with postpunk can only go so far, I think, because what This Heat, Pere Ubu, Raincoats et al had was an expressive intent and communicative urgency that is simply absent with this posteverything digitronica--  with the postpunk bands, that urgency relates to the individual vision of the artists (their personalities, temperaments, biographies), but also to the fact that even at its most extreme postpunk was nearly always a song-based and lyric-based form that could support "saying stuff".... also, further, it relates to the wider contextual Geist of postpunk as a movement and a cause, carrying with it a moral imperative to communicate, challenge,  oppose, etc ... and moreover its belief that this was possible (postpunk coming not just after  punk, but as its fulfilment / intensification / dialectical next stage)...    .

none of these things apply with post-step, which seems to be about complexity and convolution for complexity and convulotion's sake.... a very pure form of music, in that sense -- but what that means is that it stands or falls on A/  just how experimental /sonically mindblowing you actually find it to be, and B/ how much you value experimentalism/aural-weirdness for their own sake 

in terms of B/ when it comes to dance that's just one of several metrics for me, several considerations -- and in terms of A/ well i'm still processing his many many recommendations (man, the guy's a digger, a chaser!).... for now can't quite hear the  "uncontrolled upsurge of revolutionary modernism" he's talking about...  seems more like Lisa Blanning's verdict on Night Slugs as a mixture not a direction -- i.e. stuck in that zone of addition (this + that + the other) and never quite makes it to the multiplication stage (this x that x the other = ?!%#$?@!?!)

BUT some of the stuff -- taken as an aggregate of established power-moves -- is pretty fucking exciting


i do like the ravey swoops and smears in this 

and in this one 

which almost has a PCP gloomcore feel but with friskier beats -- that oddly and cleverly combine a feeling of monolithic and polyrhythmic -- the effect at once cluttered and slammin'

i think he sells it slightly short by calling it post-step - it doesn't seem to have much of anything to do with Objekt and Hessle and Kimbie and all that abstrusity

the stuff he's celebrated does seems to be constructed around a dancefloor of the mind's ear (whereas postdubstep is increasingly abstracted from any body/crowd scenario)

i'd be tempted to call it ravestep if that wasn't almost as lame a word as post-step

what the tracks below have in common

is that they're all listed in 'Bass Canon', Spin's list of the top 30 dubstep tracks of all time

i haven't posted all of the list's tracks... and made a point of leavin gout the most not-really-dubstep-lets-be-honest inclusions (Musical Mob 'pulse x', joyO's humphrey mango,  n***gas in paris, girl unit's 'wut'), but even with the "core" ones posted below, what's  striking is precisely that they show the lack of a core to dubstep. Has there ever been a dance genre that's varied so widely in tempo, rhythmic feel, texture, mood?

it's less a genre than a coalition of flavas that all shared a common starting point (jungle/ UKG)

in that sense like postpunk maybe, a possibility space, a permutational zone ....    

of course a hard core has formed within dubstep, since 2006-7, what with the wobble>brostep trajectory, but that development drove all who refused to go along with that monolithic logic to scatter even further away from each other ... the perimeters of the possibility-zone stretched and grew ever more diffuse  =what we reluctantly call postdubstep

but even before "postdubstep", dubstep had a post-ness to it, it was post-garage, post-jungle-- it wasn't as defined or delimited as either jungle or garage were