March has been an absolute musical mazzer. I’ve been living a life of perfect balance between music that’s strictly for studying and music that’s strictly for letting lose and having a good time, the latter assisted by this month’s four (count ‘em, four!) raves and the recent aftermath of another classic round of Ultra sets. In a previous post I reflected on my Study Music Evolution over the past couple years - now I want to share what’s really been boiling my water over the past month.
Jump Up Loves Dubstep
The Simula Incident
I was first introduced to Simula in the back of a refrigeration trailer parked in Vancouver’s portside industrial area on February 1st. Owen and I were struggling to pre-game a Vantek event hosting DVS1. Both of us were exhausted by a full day activity on little sleep and were feeling the type of tired impenetrable even by soju, some coolers, and a truly mediocre joint. However, Owen and my relationship with going to events is similar to Robbie’s recent description of me as a “competitive drug do-er”. If you’re not in, you’re boring.
To keep the energy going, Owen pulled up the latest track by a newly-discovered dnb artist named Simula. While I’d fallen head over heels for squelchy jump-up after seeing SOTA, this wonky dark-sided track was just too out-there - or so I felt at the time.
Cut to: two days later when Owen sent me an Instagram post from Stacked. Simula would be playing at Village.
In the weeks leading up to Simula’s appearance I tried to keep my hopes down, but was failing in a spectacularly fun fashion. Simula’s DnB Allstars set had an amazing first half, but the second half got a bit weird and strayed from the traditional “triple-a-minute” jump up that my goat SOTA was known for. Despite all this, I knew the music was going to be intense and that there was one thing that would elevate the night’s sound to epic proportions - a pairing like a good bottle of wine and a gourmet meal, or like watching Youtube and eating lunch. 2CB.
I could (and should, and will) write a separate blog post on 2CB in the future. For now, feel free to do your own research, or just trust me when I say that this is the best club drug known to man. It gives you all the sound-focusing effects that LSD does, without any of the visual (and only minor think-ie) psychedelic effects, and, according to Owen, enhances touch and the awareness of your body in similar ways to M - there’s a reason it was sold under the brand name “Erox” by a German pharma company back in the late 70s.
At 12PM the day of the event, I was eating lunch at Sprouts and checked the tracking of my drug delivery and found that the package had arrived at my house that morning. That evening, I portioned the powder out with my swiss army knife, separated it into two baggies and made a quick pit stop for coolers the BCL before meeting Owen at Emery Barnes.
Now, one of the perks of being a “competitive drug do-er” (Robbie, you really hit the nail on the head) is the experience I bring to the game. Owen and I did exactly the right amount of drugs (25mg), at exactly the right time before the event (45 minutes), combined with exactly the right amount of alcohol (two 5%‘ers) to have us feeling light, energetic, and excited about the night to come fifteen minutes before Simula came on. The thing I most enjoy about 2CB is that it makes you want to d.a.n.c.e, and looking around the event, I could tell the few folks who showed up were present for the sole purpose of throwing the fuck down.
Owen and I feeling our oats right up at the front and when Simula came on I knew we were in for a legendary night. Dressed in a baggy beige tshirt, matching sweatpants, and sporting the classic British lad buzz, he looked like he’d just got off his couch (where apparently he does make a lot of his music) and flew from the UK to play for a small gathering of the biggest dnb fiends in Vancouver.
And play he did. I didn’t stop moving for a single minute of that hour-and-a-half set. One moment, I was right up front stepping with Owen, and the next I was throwing it down heavy in the back of the crowd next to some dancers who were flowing within an inch of their lives. It was one of those moments where you weren’t moving your body to the music, the music was ripping into your body, jacking into your nerve endings, and controlling your brain and biceps from the inside out. Throughout the night, the music coming from those massive speakers never let up - no breaks, no pauses, no time to remark about something to your friends. It was pure, savage, roaring chaos. At a certain point towards the end of the set, the music descended into what I can only describe as ten minutes of being tased - I was drooling on the floor while feeling up the speaker and ape-stepping to the sounds of a chainsaw being wielded as an instrument right next to my ear.
Owen and I weren’t able to fully recap the entire set of the course of walking from downtown to his house near Arbutus. But we both knew we’d had one of the best times of our lives in that basement below Celebrities.
Massive (massive massive)
Over the next couple weeks I kept trying to put my finger on what made Simula’s sound so unique. Each track’s drum and bass backing was intentionally minimal and punctuated by silence briefly filled by bone-chilling echoing mumbles and modulated screams. Simula’s music sounded like the thoughts of the full grown xenomorph from Ridley Scott’s 1979 Alien as it hunted the humans through the corridors of the Nostromo. The echos of distorted sound was the alien hearing the fearful, increasingly desperate crew scrambling to save themselves while the ultimate apex predator calmly, almost gleefully, sawed through them with terrifying precision.
This was when I realized that Simula’s music reminded me of that original UK dubstep sound. Tracks like Loefah’s “Natural Charge” included similar crushed drum hits and wobbly bass, not to mention dubstep’s obsession with pauses in music filled with obscure pitched-down vocal samples. The minimalism was there, the coldness was there, and the syncopated lurch of dub pervaded both styles of music.
So again, this finals season, I’ve been listening to UK dubstep, but the parallels between Simula and the classic UK genre only made me more interested in the artists defining the scene in the early 2000s. As garage leapt into the mainstream in the late 90s, a darker and more minimal side of the sound began to take hold of a small collective of new producers. Big Apple Records in Croydon, South London acted as a meeting place for genre pioneers like Skream and Benga, who evolved the sound from 2-step garage to dubstep.
Dubstep spread through pirate radio, the newly-born internet, and DMZ nights, which were to dubstep as Metalheadz’s Blue Note club nights were to dnb. Genre heavyweights like Mala and Loefah pushed the sound to new depths, before the genre began to splinter and was eventually overshadowed by Skrillex’s heavy-metal interpretation beginning in 2010.
But don’t worry, I’m not one of those boomers-in-spirit in the Youtube comments section ranting about how “bro-step” dirtied the name of their pure genre. US dubstep, UK dubstep - they’re both great, they’re both different, and that’s ok - I’m honestly just glad to have discovered both, and I love that old UK genres like dnb and dubstep are melding together today to create some truly bowl-loosening music.
Alchemist Cooks (Brews?)
If you’ve listened to DnB Allstar’s Summer or Winter 2024 mixes, you know they love Alcemist. While studying in the basement of the Nest one day, I put on his Allstars set, and within the first ten minutes was searching up the names of most of the tracks.
I love Alchemist’s signature timing of his slow-fried bass hits in combination with his snappy vocals. His tracks are simple and paired-down to what he knows are the beats that will get the job done, and nothing else. Few of his tracks have outstandingly high energy, but every single one is something I’m sure I could share with a friend who was hearing a dnb track for the first time.
Liquid is Eternal
Moving from the hardest hitting wonky dnb through tracks with more melodic vocals, we land on the classic, the original, the liquid. I have been listening to a lot of liquid dnb this study season, with a specific emphasis on the YouTube search criteria “atmospheric dnb”, which I recently realized is an actual genre, and not something I need to say under my breath as if I’m embarrassed. In my last music appreciation post, I expressed that most of these “PlayStation ambient breakcore atmospheric jungle” mixes were corny-boots, aside from a few exceptions. Well, part of being a mature, functioning member of society is knowing to admit when you’re wrong about a musical genre, and I was absolutely incorrect. I love those atmospheric mixes so much that I thought about creating a playlist, but realized that I could put pretty much any one of them on and they’d squeeze my lemons just fine.
There are a few channels which produce large volumes of consistently good content - FIREWALKER and 4AM Breaks being two of my mains. However, the mix I’d like to give the biggest shoutout to a 1995 mix by none other than the OG, the legend, the selecta - Goldie.
In addition, YouTube isn’t the only good place to go for liquid enjoyers. Bassdrive.com, recommended by the good folks on Reddit, has a 24/7, 365 online radio which, the times I’ve tuned in on the bus home, hasn’t missed the mark.
Skrillex Returns to Ultra
Ten years since Skrillex set the standard for what the best Ultra set looked like, he was back headlining the mainstage with a heartfelt tribute to Avicii and a set full of unreleased IDs. Well, not for long. The day after Ultra let out, Skrillex dropped a surprise studio album, and it is an absolute banger.
If this is your first time listening to the album, make sure to listen to it front to back - shuffle off - and give it your full attention. Here are some reviews from the fam:
It’s officially cool to listen to Skrillex in 2025 - to be fair, for my age group, it never wasn’t. The album absolutely has Skrill leaning into the creative elements that have defined his sound from the start, and contains elements from his more recent tunes like “Mumbai Power”. It also calls back to Quest For Fire in just the right, tasteful ways that only a master producer can do. When listening to this album, you know the man is in control, and is understands his sound, influences, and past to a tee. Listening to Skrillex’s music, you immediately understand that he is a creative genius who is constantly pushing to further his craft to unlock new sounds and emotions in his listeners. It’s a passion that shows and a passion that works. Thank you for a truly fabulous simultaneously standalone and self-referential piece of art, Skrillex.