Written for Clash magazine, September 2006 issue

As dubstep continues its unstoppable rise, one label stands out as the most consistently innovative and forward thinking of all. Shrouded in mystery and home to the most soulful, visionary and futuristic music in the scene, Hyperdub has made huge waves thanks to adventurous releases from Burial and the label’s founder, Steve Goodman – better known as Kode9. Starting life as an influential webzine, founded in 2000 after Goodman moved to London from his native Glasgow, the first release on the label came from Kode9 two years later.

Hyperdub’s biggest release to date is Burial’s debut, an album that had the online dubstep community salivating for months ahead of its May release, especially since an interview with blogger Martin ‘Blackdown’ Clark revealed that the unnamed producer makes all his music using only Soundforge, a basic wave editor, on his PC. The track titles (‘Broken Home’, Night Bus’, ‘Pirates’) and the music itself, which weaves ghost-like traces of UK garage and jungle into its dense sonic collage, vividly evoke the feelings of modern city life in an utterly unique way. Goodman – currently writing a book, ‘Sonic Warfare’, “about the rhythmic micropolitics of vibration” – agrees: “The Burial album captures one dimension of the living in a city, and without being superficially happy, it’s a very melancholy record, transforming a lot of the negativity into something quite beautiful. Grime and dubstep both do something similar, in transforming aspects of urban pressure into something constructive, perhaps in quite different but overlapping ways, more or less aggressive, more or less agitable, nervous and claustrophobic. That’s not a new move, but cities and the experiences they produce evolve, and grime and dubstep have captured something specific about London this century.”

As any genre attains critical mass there is a danger of music becoming formulaic, of producers jumping on bandwagons, and for hype to tarnish the atmosphere and stifle innovation – just look at drum & bass, which arguably ran into a creative cul-de-sac some years back. Goodman says: “Its an evolutionary certainty that scenes have innovators and followers, that the process of proliferation is part dilution, part mutation. To a certain extent this evolution is kind of dismally predictable, especially as there are a lot of young people interested in the music who might not have learnt from want went wrong musically in the evolution of jungle. But that historical ignorance allows room for people to be inventive and try things without too much forethought – that’s how you got something as sonically strange as early grime.”

And one area that Goodman sees as vital to the healthy progression of dubstep is the use of vocals – as exemplified by his collaborations with MC-cum-dub-poet Spaceape. He explains: “Dubstep works as an instrumental sound. But it sounds just as good, if not better, with a strong vocal. It adds a whole new dimension to the music, opens up a vast field of potential exploration, and a broader audience. In terms of sonic innovation, most scenes have a finite life span before they get formulaic. It would be a madness to lock off that potential, to lock off the potential of rap, of song, of spoken word. Does the world really need another strictly instrumental dance music genre? I think not.”

© Tom Churchill 2006