As another finals season crawls to a close, a now-expected benefit is the bounty of new DJ sets unearthed on YouTube. A trend dating back to my first year of University (when I learned all of PHYS 158 while listening to my 30 hour Raag and Kirtan playlist on Spotify), the efficacy of my study grindset is proportional to the new music I discover while spending hours alone in front of my computer. This term, I’ve been digging into the back catalogue of 90s drum and bass and 2000s UK dubstep, introducing myself to Goldie and Loefah, among other genre OGs.
My initial encounters with the styles of electronic music that grabbed my brain stem and sent shivers down my spine was through watching films made in the early to mid 80s - the original Blade Runner foremost among them. I’m a firm believer that everyone should first experience this film the same way I did - coming down from a 12-hour acid trip in a pitch-black bedroom at 4AM. Wrapped in a cocoon of darkness, I watched as flames plumed above a future metropolis, the camera’s slow pan in giving the viewer’s awe-struck brain time to grapple with the scale of these metallic pyramids crawling with worm-like steel pipes.
Years later, the opening scene of Akira would evoke in me this same sense of awe tinged with fear, as the clear notes of a late 80s synthesizer carrying the viewer forward into impending doom. This melancholy, nostalgia-evoking synth would come to define the sound of movies from the 90s, the most powerful example of which is Joe Hisaishi’s soundtrack to the Takeshi Kitano film Sonatine.
A year later, I was trekking through a heavy night-time snowfall in Kanata (a suburb of Ottawa) when my best friend the Spotify algorithm queued up a song from Emil Rottmayer. As soon as I got home (and stripped off my winter boots, thick gloves, wool socks, neck warmer, puffer coat, toque, and base layer), I searched up “music like Blade Runner soundtrack”, and was formally introduced to the Moog synthesizer and artists like Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream. For the next year, my brain could only be satisfied by my 30-hour playlist of clicking basslines and whining arpeggiated chords.
As my love-affair with 80s electronica began to turn stale, I itched for new music which would scratch that spot deep in my grey-matter - my electronic awe had peaked while biking home from Iona beach late one night, a jumbo jet briefly eclipsing the pinprick stars as the ticks of Microscopic by Gas swelled. Fortunately, my music rut was shattered soon after when I attended my first rave, leading me to discover the holy grail of music - full-length DJ sets on YouTube. Around this same time, I began getting to know a co-worker at Sanctuary AI who produced electronic music in his spare time. One day at lunch we were chatting about our music tastes, and I asked him, “so, who have you been listening to a lot recently”? Half an hour later, I was locked in at my lab bench with Spotify pulled up, adding any Spray song I could to a new playlist.
With the maddest selecta Spotify, it’s no longer necessary to constrain oneself to preconceived genre definitions (although they’re certainly now trying as they bring in these weirdly-styled and named ultra-specific playlists - you’re trying too hard, Spotify, and it doesn’t suit you). Through Spray’s song radio, I discovered the sounds of progressive house, with melodies rooted in 70s disco and refined with 90s rave. Around the same time, my interest in drum machines and accelerated bpms spiked when my co-worker put me on to Jeff Mill’s famous Exhibitionist mix, and I independently discovered X Club’s Public Disturbance album.
With X Club (and Kettama) came my proper introduction to the 90s-influenced sounds of the UK, chief among them breakbeat. Listening to X Club’s Scum 3-03 while biking along the Vancouver seawall on a cold winter night reminded me of the wet, steam-filled streets of Blade Runner, this time from a renegade Replicant’s perspective. These cold, propulsive beats were the sounds of trains passing deep underground, each high hat hit the hiss of a hovercraft spiraling up between a lattice of buildings.
After a particularly exhilarating experience at a set by Jeff from Kelowna, I was reading an interview with the DJ where he cited the artist Vex’d as an influence for him beginning dubstep production. Up to this point, I didn’t realize that dubstep as most of us know it today is really American dubstep, popularized by Skrillex in the early 2010s, and that there’s a whole other realm of music from the early 2000s in the UK sharing the same name.
If you blow up the album art of Pop Pop by Vex’d, you know you’re in for an intense listening experience - dark and gritty and minimal, like running your fingers along a chain-link fence surrounding a power plant late at night. However, I initially wasn’t taken with other UK dubstep songs I dug up on Spotify. They were boring and slow- a pale shadow of the towering-flame-demon-beating-you-to-death-with-your-own-limbs sounds of the dubstep I was used to.
My expedition into the drum and bass back catalogue caused me to reconsider, and really begin to enjoy, UK dubstep this finals season. OG 90s dnb blipped onto my radar while scrolling Pintrest, finding a cool Metalheadz logo, and trying to get it printed on a t-shirt. At the same time, a friend sent me a chill dnb set by DnB Allstars which wasn’t three hours of sub focus or jump up. Amidst the low-poly nintendo-64 thumbnails of videos with titles like “intelligent drum and bass / liquid jungle y2k aesthetic” (ok, some of which are pretty good), I finally listened to the foundational artists - including Goldie, Andy C, Friction, and Calibre - on which these generic mixes were based.
Listening to this technical style of dnb made me reconsider UK dubstep, and as I listened to more hour+ sets while studying, I realized that the power of a UK dubstep set was in it’s length and progression, as opposed to waiting for a drop every three minutes - just like how progressive house and synth scratch that brain itch. The biggest moment of a UK dubstep set might be 30 minutes in, when the beat stops, a distorted vocal comes in for a few seconds, and then the beat drops for the next half of the set (and there are few payoffs more satisfying than this).
Some clean UK dubstep sets I’ve been listening to over this finals season are included below (partially for my reference, so I can find them in a couple years when my interest inevitably circles back around).
Big up DJ Rufage for his massive vinyl mix and DJ Johney of Czech dubstep collective Soul Ex Machina for one of a similarly high calibre.