Loading ...Low Frequency Oscillations
Last Friday night, or perhaps it was morning by then, a sweatbox club in one of south London’s forgotten boroughs began to throb. Empty beer bottles tottered on ledges and speaker stacks, then dropped, smashing to pieces. Fixtures and fittings shook as if in some invisible wind. The urinal rattled and creaked, a hunk of dull grey steel clinging to the dirty white tiles for dear life; its patrons, in fairness, doing likewise. As everything else in this part of the city went to sleep, Hyperdub boss and dubstep innovator Kode9 was waking the building up.
I could feel it too; the bass rolled itself through my bones, my veins, my valves, and out through my skin. We’re used to music stirring something in our minds, and that’s why the bottomed-out frequencies of house, dubstep, funky, whatever, pack such a sonic punch. It’s a physical thing, and when those low tones rumble, so do you. For Kode9, for the artists on his label, which turns five this month, creating that feeling, operating at the outer limits of sound, has become something of a mission.
From the ghostly, rain-spattered cityscapes of Burial and the dread-filled ruminations of Kode9’s own early work with the Spaceape through to the label’s recent forays into wonky, funky bashment and digital soul, Hyperdub is that rare thing; an imprint that delights in the new and bold and different, but somehow manages to retain a coherence of its own, so that taken together every twelve inch, every LP, band together in constellation, set their eyes in the same direction.
With a background in Edinburgh’s jungle and garage scene, Kode9, then known simply as Steve Goodman, set up Hyperdub in late 2004, one of a handful of artists seeking to consolidate the word-of-mouth excitement surrounding pioneering clubnight into something more tangible. Its first release was also Goodman’s first under his new moniker, a dubbed-out and barely recognisable reinterpretation of Prince’s ‘Sign O’ The Times’. Selling out its original run in weeks, low-end missives from Burial, The Bug and L.V. followed soon after, with Kode9’s ‘Memories Of The Near Future’ album and Burial’s eponymous full-length climbing to the upper reaches of many year-end lists in 2006.
It was in 2007, though, that Hyperdub really cemented its reputation as one of electronic sound’s most urgent and avant-garde forces. Spreading outwards from its cosy original coterie of London-based producers, all schooled in the UK’s fertile nineties dance scene, the label utilised the new global pull of dubstep and its online network of forums and radio stations to push bass music ever further into the future.
It hooked up with artists in the States, Japan and elsewhere already carrying out similar experiments, people like Flying Lotus and Samiyam, but also a new generation of bass addicts, for whom Hyperdub’s earliest releases acted as a sonic frame of reference in much the same way that jungle and 2-step once did for a younger Kode9. Over the last twelve months, indeed, plates from young bucks Cooly G, Ikonika, Joker and Zomby have been ripping up dancefloors like little else. Take one listen to Joker’s ‘Digidesign’ or Cooly’s ‘Narst’ and you can hear why, those omnipresent b-lines taking new and more playful shapes, at times more buoyant, more imbued with the bounce and swing of house, at others dirty and squelchy but veneered with synths in the brightest hues.
Given that Hyperdub’s rich form is winning over new initiates day by day and from across the musical spectrum – few now see it as merely a dubstep label per se - it’s just as well, perhaps, that it’s chosen to celebrate its fifth birthday with a double disc primer compiling tracks spanning the label’s short history, as well as a clutch of new ones. 32 tracks long and artfully curated by Kode9 himself, it’s an astonishing document of the label’s depth and dexterity perfect for fans old and not so old, and, unusually for a compilation of this length, one that can be played in a single sitting without outstaying its welcome.
Only five years old, then, and Hyperdub is beginning to look important, one of those labels whose consistency, vision and quality will ensure that their records will still be played out in ten years or twenty, collected to the last catalogue number by people far too young to remember them from first time round, mentioned in the same hushed tones as Traxx, Prelude and Metroplex, or, thinking about it, how about that other boundary-pushing, era-defining electronic institution of the UK underground, Warp.
Ah yes, Warp; also celebrating an anniversary year, the Sheffield-based home to Aphex Twin, Autechre and Squarepusher, but also Battles, Broadcast and Grizzly Bear, will be blowing out twenty candles this month. The label was founded by Steve Beckett and Rob Mitchell in the tail end of 1989, just months after that second summer of love, those few months in which rave music entered the public psyche and whole swathes of young Britain got ‘on one’ and pulsed to the synthetic sounds of homegrown house and techno.
Combining the energy and abandon of those parties with the electronic experimentalism the Steel City was already famous for, from Cabaret Voltaire and The Future’s industrial wave through to the shimmering New Pop of ABC and Heaven 17, Warp’s early releases were remarkable. Give them a listen; Forgemasters’ ‘Track With No Name’ or Sweet Exorcist’s ‘Testone’, for example. These tracks were brash and pumped enough to fill a floor, but had the texture, the wit and depth, to reward home listening, and few had managed that before.
Unsurprisingly, you might say, though much to the annoyance of many of its artists, it was only a matter of time before Warp’s familiar purple globe badge became shorthand for a certain kind of electronic sound dubbed ‘Intelligent Dance Music’, or IDM, an unwelcome and largely empty label that stuck hard during Warp’s mid-nineties heyday and still continues to hound them now.
And, I must admit, it is indeed Warp’s IDM years that most stick in my mind today. My first encounter with the label was, I suspect, the same one experienced by many others; about ten years ago or so now, heaped on a sofa and thumbing the remote, screen flicking from MTV to The Box to MTV2 and back again, and a huge white stretch Hummer rolling across the screen, absurdly long, as if it took a wrong turn in some parallel and grotesque universe where rap videos were still yet bigger, bolder and more brazen than our own, visual blasts of money, girls and power taken to new and impossible extremes.
But who rolls down the window, gets out, starts pulling shapes, contorting and gurning to the beat like a pilled-up jackhammer? Not a rap star, not a bikini dance troupe, but some bearded and pallid-looking bedroom geek, red hair and manic stare, otherwise known as Richard D. James, or the Aphex Twin, and this, it turns out, is his video for ‘Windowlicker’, perhaps the most successful release in Warp’s history. Ten minutes long, funny and disturbing in more or less equal measure, and backed by a tune so demonically weird that its instant hummability is enough to make you freak out and follow it with ten Hail Marys, it’s Warp at Warp’s best and without doubt one of the finest singles of its era.
James’ work, a knowing melange of jungle, hardcore rave, acid house and twisted references to a videogaming youth, was backed by a roster equal in talent, a group who find some of their best moments collected on Warp20, a box-set released to mark the label’s two decades. Squarepusher, Boards of Canada, Plaid, Autechre, Luke Vibert, Broadcast; chosen by fans, it’s near enough a who’s who of nineties glitch and electronica, ranging from horizontalist chillout and spooky cut-up pop to brain-mangling post-drum ‘n’ bass. Even more recent, rock-oriented cuts like Battles’ ‘Atlas’ re-emerge firmly in tune with the Warp aesthetic in this setting, its pitched-up vocals and glam stomp aimed as squarely at making you move as the Leeds Warehouse mix of ‘LFO’ or Jimmy Edgar’s ‘I Wanna Be Your STD’, both also collected here. And yes, it’s got ‘Windowlicker’ too. How could it not?
So two labels, two anniversaries, and plenty to celebrate. I’ve just spent the best part of four hours listening to the Hyperdub and Warp birthday collections back to back, and the common threads, the similarities in drive and quality and, more than anything, ethos, are hard to miss. Both are about the push forward, the leap into the dark, the buzz and thrill of the dance; the distance between LFO and L.V., say, is on this evidence but a short one, and you might even credit Hyperdub with reinvigorating its older cousin over the last year or so, it having picked up Hyperdub luminaries Flying Lotus, Hudson Mohawke and Rustie. Do yourself a favour this week, then, and go and listen to these collections, expertly compiled and all the hard work done for you, and hopefully you’ll see why this music is still so crucial; and when you’ve done that, raise your glasses…here’s to another five years, here’s to another twenty.
Brilliant!