Underwater Dancehall

viktorvaughn

Well-known member
A lot of people are making general statements about dubstep - essentially that it's all plodding, serious drudge-step that noone dances to - which even with my knowledge of dubstep (which is nothing compared to some of the heads on here) are demonstrably untrue. I've seen people dancing fairly excitedly to dubstep. I'm aware of all sorts of upbeat, even sexy, dubstep - Benga and Mala's respective takes on housiness, all sorts of 2-step revivals, older stuff like Horsepower or El-B. Christ, even the wobbler du jour, Cockney Thug, comes with a swingy 4x4 beat and a latin brass riff to offset the wub-wub-wub. So I'm kind of forced to conclude that some people are forming their opinions of dubstep based on listening to a couple of N-Type radio mixes rather than actually having any in depth experience of the music.

Intellectual pontification on musical without grass roots experience of said music is a popular pastime of some pople here.

Go to DMZ Leeds and there are tons of girls, kids grinding and pulling, dealers, loads of pilled up ravers, people skanking, smoking and dancing away...

I'm not saying is all great music cos there's obviously loads of tosh around, but the engrained blog-stereotype of it just being masses of 17yr old geeky white boys standing still and having a shit time is patently wrong.

Granted FWD does sometimes get a bit much if the beats are boring, but sometimes I want a quiet Friday night and standing still, not dancing, near a speaker and hearing Kode9
DJ is pretty sublime. Hopefully not dancing is a legitime pastime in a club if I am enjoying the music, otherwise please advise urgently all, as would hate to be caught consuming music in the incorrect manner.
 

Poet for Hire

Well-known member
The last few Kode9 sets I've heard at Fwd and Bestival, you wouldnt be standing still next to the speaker. But according to the forward website, he's doing a Burial Album preview mix at Fwd this friday night.
 
N

nomadologist

Guest
I'm sure this is a vital scene and people enjoy the fuck out of it. You have to understand, I have no frame of reference for this. This is what happens in NY when you have a party:

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zhao

there are no accidents
thanks for posting that cobrasnake bullshit nomad and reminding me of why i left the states.

dj aoki's face really makes me nauseous
 

zhao

there are no accidents
That first tune is wicked if anyone knows what it is.

can't tell you what it is off the top but i've a wicked bhangra collection. if you are interested we can make an addendum to the international trade agreement signed last week, and i will throw in some essential India Sweets and Spices into the shipments. just say the word.

(sorry about inbox. space has been cleared)
 

blubeat

blubeat
but seriously, is there anyone on dissensus who doesn't know that already? that argument's been rammed down everyone's throats for years now, surely the soundsystem thing is a given whenever you enter into any dubstep discussion these days..

bringing it up almost sounds patronising given how long people have been saying it
You are probably correct. Sorry, I don't hang out hear enough to know how long other posters have been or how often the drum has been banged, so to speak.

My post was a knee-jerk response to "pinch isn't danceable" and in my opinion he is. After that I rambled a bit. I become more like Grandpa Simpson every day.

[croaks] Why, in my day....Zzzzz
 

redcrescent

Well-known member
any suggestions on shops in berlin Mr. Crescent? :) for soca and other "world" music (forgive me)...
Never been to Berlin, sadly, but there's a Berlin-based bunch who do all flavors of Antillean music, called Mash Up or Mash It Crew (or some variation on the theme), saw them do their stuff in Austria some time ago and they did some serious pan-Caribbean beat juggling. I remember the flyer advertising the Faluma music shop, which appears to be located in Berlin as well. I'd recommend a visit as they stock all kinds of music from Trinidad and the wider Caribbean, lots of it on vinyl to boot.
 

redcrescent

Well-known member
Ahhh, "downtown"...I always get those jamaican patties in my neighborhood but this sounds pretty amazing. Ever been to Crown Heights for the festival?
Sadly, no, my visits to your wonderful city are few and far between, but maybe someday I'll be in NYC for carnival. I've heard that it's mad in the very best way.
 

shudder

Well-known member
just to pick up a little on Gek's thread, I don't think I really quite *got* a lot of dubstep (beyond the moody/cinematic/Loefah-horror aspect) until I listened to some cheesier, dancier, more fun 2-step, which as a north american was pretty alien to me. All the playful, skittering high hats and the shifting, jumping kick drums, with a little housey vocal here or there, or some hugely processed rnb.

Dubstep is obviously so much less exuberant, sometimes verging on anhedonic, which is I guess what is turning Zhao off at the moment.
 

zhao

there are no accidents
i'm just super anti "cold dark futuristic machine" right now. (after 10 year abusive relationship with it) not just dubstep. (looking forward to new Burial and future Shackleton tho)
 

benjybars

village elder.
Intellectual pontification on musical without grass roots experience of said music is a popular pastime of some pople here.

Go to DMZ Leeds and there are tons of girls, kids grinding and pulling, dealers, loads of pilled up ravers, people skanking, smoking and dancing away...

I'm not saying is all great music cos there's obviously loads of tosh around, but the engrained blog-stereotype of it just being masses of 17yr old geeky white boys standing still and having a shit time is patently wrong..

agree fully..

there might have been the odd dull FWD but 99% of the dubstep nights i've been to have been sick.. bare atmosphere, loads of skanking etc. If they were all boring I wouldn't go. standard.
 

gumdrops

Well-known member
dont really rate the vocal tracks on this (only hafl way through though so maybe they get better) too much. they sound a bit amateurish for want of a better word. not quite there yet. also i dont know if its my new speakers (theyre vintage 70s ones) or what but the beats dont have as much heaviness as i thought they might have.
 

Gavin

booty bass intellectual
I wonder if it's a similar ethos to the Shockout stuff, DJ Rupture's album and Shadetek's newest... A guilt trip for all those breakcore dudes being all colonial oppressah and illegally sampling Cutty Ranks a few years ago, now making amends by paying vocalists and leaving their contributions more or less intact... they seem to fail in a similar way. Maybe it's something in the mastering of the vocals, I dunno. I say, you paid for it, chop that shit up!
 

gumdrops

Well-known member
yeah they sound a bit flat, both in terms of performance (not bold enough) and just the way theyve been recorded. quite 'small' sounding.
 
N

nomadologist

Guest
Without the vocals, I think I might rather enjoy this except there's something thin-sounding about the production to me, the synth parts sound digitally watery but without any saturation, if that makes sense. I think it could be even "moister", to borrow a word from Gek.
 

gumdrops

Well-known member
yeah, it def sounds a bit thin. not really hard or muscular enough. i dont wanna say coffee table but its a little bit twee in places. reminds me a bit of the kode 9 album, which i liked, but wished was a bit more brawny sonically.
 
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gumdrops

Well-known member
i like the braininess, and i love that its a bit more meditative and well 'soulful' than a lot of dubstep, but im talking about sonically, the kode 9/spaceape album is a tiny bit 'thin' and small sounding when you compare it with something thats so full and deep/lush sounding like request line or even sign of the dub or kode's skeng remix.
 

gek-opel

entered apprentice
pah, dubstep's overrun with mindless brawn, it's a bit of brain ballance that's needed.

Precisely- if you want beefiness there's literally 100s of substandard producers out there who will gladly fulfill your every thugstep need. Pinch's whole schtick is a certain daintiness, a cerebral elegance of reduction and the calligraphic eloquence of a few perfectly judged brushstrokes... if anything the vocals and melodic synth work overcook quite a few of the tracks, but at his absolute peak ("Qawalli" of course, though "Airlock" from his new abum gets pretty close...) his music is delightfully sensual , non-masculine, an alien beauty quite apart from the blokeish skrewface grump of conventional dubstep or the techno-wank of IDM... it is transportative music, dub re-imagined not as re-hash (which as K-punk rightly pointed out a while back loses the idea of dub-as-process, as always in relation to the ghost-ing out of a previously material song) but as a way in (along with modern minimal) to gorgeous new forms of design-led beauty.
 
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gek-opel

entered apprentice
i like the braininess, and i love that its a bit more meditative and well 'soulful' than a lot of dubstep, but im talking about sonically, the kode 9/spaceape album is a tiny bit 'thin' and small sounding when you compare it with something thats so full and deep/lush sounding like request line or even sign of the dub or kode's skeng remix.

I agree! I did say something like that at the time about the Kode9 album... that it was a bit plasticky and shonky, but my impression is that it was a deliberate aesthetic decision, to make it sound primitive and shanty-town, as if it were mashed together from corrugated iron and 3rd world detritus. Still something like early Tricky (or the first Mark Stewart solo album) did a similar thing but with more satisfyingly analogue-ish textures and fatter production... though again Kode9 is quoted as saying he prefers the more synthetic production style of Grime to the fatness of dubstep, so this may all be intentional...
 
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