Agreed. I never saw dubstep as "new age" at all. It was much too angular and dark, and had this kind of paranoid tension, like the kind you get when you walk at night through a neighbourhood you aren't familiar with. The "meditate" part seemed to me to just come from the physical experience of listening to dubstep in a club - the way the bass pressure affected your body. The attraction wasn't anything particularly spiritual, and I don't think the music was being made from any real kinds of sophisticated pretensions (not, at least, anywhere close to the kinds of pretensions you find now). All in all, it was just rave music.
The one thing I got tired of hearing music critics say was that you couldn't dance to it. That was definitely proof they'd never been to a club night. It was a challenge at first to figure out how you might move to it, what with all the spaced out percussion, but then something like "Haunted" would drop, and the question would be answered pretty fucking quickly.
I think all those classic tunes from 2006/7 by Skream/Mala/D1 etc. are amazing to dance to.
Yeah, I mean being a bit pretentious only really becomes a problem when the tunes aren't amazing. At that point, a lot of the tunes were amazing, so no problem.Basically agree with all of this. I think there was something slightly pretentious/self-consciously 'dark' about some of the dubstep tunes that I got into the genre through, but I don't think that really acted against them, for me those tunes created an intense mood as effectively as a horror/sci-fi film.
Also all true.I liked some of that coldness/dead-eyed-repetitiveness in dubstep, just as I used to like it in DNB (everyone likes getting loved up on drugs but its also quite perversely enjoyable getting horribly wired/paranoid - or maybe that's just me? lol!).
Besides, I remember going to DMZ in 2007 and there actually being quite an emotional range to the music as a whole; the 'darkness' of Mala tunes is generally completely different to the 'darkness' of Loefah tunes, for example. And more importantly the rhythms seemed immensely danceable to me as soon as I went to a dubstep night, I think all those classic tunes from 2006/7 by Skream/Mala/D1 etc. are amazing to dance to.
playing house and garage and dubstep and grime in the space of four hours isn't eclectic, it's obvious.
if you get swamped and overwhelmed by eclecticism it's your own fault. if you want focus, focus your listening habits.
sick boy said:I'd also say part of the burden also falls on the person booking the night as well, in making sure that all the DJ's selected to play also will, taken together, produce that common ground
a lot more focussed and coherent than it was a year ago
I remember when I used to go dubstep nights here in Finland, I was one of the few people dancing in double time. Sometimes dancefloor crew would wave their hand in half time like in some hiphop gig... Maybe proper dancing were just too feminine/uncool for them - Finland is a heavy metal country afterall...people annoy me when they dance half time to dubstep, it looks so fucking stupid.
Lets face it, you follow the beat double time anyway, (well i do) why not just move your body to the hi hats
Yeah it was fun and interesting trying to figure for first time how to dance it. It was fresh feel dancing to dubstep!! First time I used to do sometimes a move, where I would alongside "normal" moves do little jump and smash my feet into the ground when the halftime snare hitSectionfive said:Anybody who was ever at a dubstep night from the start playing the early set, promoting or whatever can attest that
there were always people who didn't have clue what to do for a while but they always went home with a few new moves.
Where is it focussing though?
I don't think people saying that it's one massive, indecipherable eclectic blur are quite on the mark either.
This is where the DJ comes in, hasn't changed one bit since Mancuso surely.
If there does need to be focus, surely its up to the individual DJ to decide what that is.
the LV album is really something, really good
Thought as much, is it closer to either 38 or okzharp type stuff?
Or something different all together?