I wanted number 200 to be a special one. Meanwhile, I was facing down an inevitable run date for one of the most purely enjoyable interviews I’ve ever done—because the book, Lauren Martin’s Aftershock: The Seismic Impact of Dubstep, which covers the music’s first, deeply London-centric decade, is now available in the U.S. (You can order it here.) Needless to say, I caved to the inevitable once I realized, of course! That’s our number 200, right there.
Lauren Martin has been writing about dance music for quite a while by now—searchingly, smartly, and with an especial ear for dialect. She is, in short, exactly the person to make this oral history. And Aftershock instantly joins the dance-music-book pantheon: intimately rendered and gorgeously illustrated, a volume where you can choose to sink into the stories or to take away a lifetime’s worth of incidental data from the illustrations: a bevy of flyers, photos of bedroom studios that look like they’ve been freshly raided, and an uncountable number of Sharpie’d-up CD-Rs.
Clearly, this was the person to ask if they wanted to pick five mixes and discuss them. Lauren actually did this one better—she picked six. Did I complain? Hell no! I got to listen and learn about six great sets, and then I got to discuss it all over two back-to-back Zoom sessions (I don’t have a Pro account, LOL). Hence, this will run in two parts. Below are the first five, in order. The sixth, as you’ll see, engendered plenty of what-came-next talk. And all of it was a blast. Hope you find it that way as well.
You can hear all of these sets at this YouTube playlist.
Youngsta, Dubstep Allstars Vol. 2 (Tempa CD; rel. August 2005)
What Lauren said in email: “A lot to say about Youngsta, half-step, and how his DJing style was hugely influential.”
MM: This is just an excuse for me to listen to a bunch of mixes as chosen by an expert. It is striking how intertwined drum & bass, garage, and techno are—and yet dubstep almost immediately has its own stamp, is its own thing. Certainly by 2005, when this CD comes out.
LAUREN MARTIN: Yes, absolutely. By 2005, this is the second of the Dubstep Allstars series. First one was Hatcha, who is the other Tempa original DJ. But Hatcha and Youngsta have very different styles of DJing.
There’s a few strands to this. One is that Youngsta had a very close relationship with Loefah in this period. There’s a chapter in the book devoted to their relationship. Youngsta talks at length about his style of DJing, and that he deliberately wanted to be a single-genre specialist. So, when you’re talking about garage, jungle, drum & bass, all these things are kind of mixing and mingling—Youngsta, in particular, was absolutely set on being a hardcore single-genre . . . not even single-genre: single-sonic-strand specialist, and I feel like this mix does it really well.
The other thing about the mix that sets him apart from the Hatcha one, which was Vol. 1: Hatcha’s sound is very dubby, elastic. It’s got a lot of tribal bounce to it. That’s much more of a garage sound—really swung drums. Whereas Youngsta, he and Loefah particularly worked very, very hard—there’s a quote in the book where he says, “We eventually purged the garage, and we were”— he and Hatcha were—“the gatekeepers.”
So he was interested in stripping out the noisy signals, the overswung drums, the very layered bass. He wanted to take it down to absolute core elements. He had a rule that everybody he worked with must make tracks at 140 BPM with a snare on the half-time, so that he knew exactly when he would mix the tracks together.
The quote, as I recall, is that he “did it by maths.”
He did. It was maths. He didn’t even need to practice at home. I feel like that style, you can hear it, where the blends are absolutely seamless. It’s almost like building a totem pole: one stacks above the other, and it all has meaning together.
Also, it’s super-concentrated, because this CD only has four producers on it total.
Yeah, and that’s very indicative of that early style where certain DJs—I say “certain DJs”: basically, just Youngsta and Hatcha—decided to home in on a few producers each and devote their energies to [them]. Basically, they were executive-producing the producers, in such a way that those DJ sets could communicate the message of the type of tracks he really wanted to create.
It’s unusual. Usually, when you think of foundational DJs in different scenes, the Larry Levans, they’re drawing from across genres but playing it in their style. Whereas style and genre were very, very close in this era of dubstep.
I like how he did it that way because he didn’t have a way to practice.
Well . . . I think he could have had a way. He just chose not to, because he got so good at it. He’s a very unique character, and also an element of what he was doing alongside the half—just talking about that 140, with the snare and the half-time thing, is perhaps making it sound too simplistic.
Also, because he was from outer East London, he wasn’t from where all the DMZ people were. I feel like there, you can feel an element of quite grimy, hard-edged tracks in him. The way he mixed—he doesn’t mix like other DJs. It’s very singular. I can hear an East London, quite hard-edged sound in there that doesn’t feel like the dub sound system stuff that the DMZ were doing.
It makes perfect sense, the same way that within house music, there’s a New York style and a Chicago style and a Detroit style of DJing.
Uh-huh. And even within London, there was a little postcode-war thing going on at the time, which feels silly to think, because London . . .
It’s febrile. There’s so much. I was also amused to find out that Youngsta was Sarah Lockhart’s brother.
Yes, younger brother by about 10 years. So really, he speaks about her so fondly in the book, and on the point of DJing and mixing: “We’d be in the car listening to pirate radio,” and he would go, “Oh, what’s this track? I love it.” And she’s like, “Oh, I can get that for you on a white label, no problem,” because she was so connected, unbelievably. The dubstep scene would not exist without her, without question.
Did you try to interview her?
I did, but she’s just a cool cat. She also has a very senior job in the music industry in the UK. She’s always had a serious full-time music job in tandem with all the work she did in dubstep. She’s very private. We’ve spoken, and she fact checked everything in the book about her. She’s incredible, but she’s also super private and never does press, so I respect that. The benefit of an oral history is that others can speak about her fondly.
This book it feels like the right framework for the topic. I had liked it as a piece [on Vice] before that, but it was also so long that it was daunting. This is the right place for all of that information. You expand on it, and I feel like some of what you did was focus on those friendships like the Hatcha-Youngsta relationship. It feels like some of that is interspersed with the more storytelling, block-quote after block-quote sort of thing.
Yeah, I feel like the format of the oral history . . .
One, I’m not a Londoner. I’m from Glasgow. I did not go to the parties in their early iterations. I don’t think you have to be a soldier in the trenches to write about war, if I can use that analogy. I think sincerity and curiosity and respect like go a long way in doing this kind of work, anyway. And I have a genuine affection for the sound.
I was very inspired by Brian Belle-Fortune’s book All Crews, about the jungle scene: particularly, how they it made it feel like they were all sitting around the same table in a pub, talking about their lives together. That humanness comes across.
Also, really importantly to me: the way people actually speak. I feel like a lot of the time when you read someone’s interview, they edit it in a very formal “press” way. What I actually wanted is to hear Chef say, “Man’s is bonkers, bruv.” I want to feel like you’re reading like a bunch of Londoners, and oral history just gives you that breathing room.
I’m looking at page forty-eight, which has got the two sides of a Big Apple Records live flyer, and it’s the one . . .
With the roach torn out of it?
It’s the one with the banana, and it’s a gray one, and it’s just back-to-back after back-to-back after back-to-back. Part of me wonders: Were all of those back-to-backs happening simply because there was a paucity of [publicly available] records?
I would say no. Maybe because the back-to-back thing would be interesting: I feel like it engenders . . . taps more into the spirit of the dub sound-system selector. Where you’re going track-for-track, you’re pulling out your dubs, you’re impressing people. I would imagine that that part of it would be that. But also, in terms of, when you say “the paucity of the records,” there would be a split between that . . . I’d say there were significantly more dubs . . . There’s a difference between the dubs that people cut for their collections and keep exclusive, and then there’s a much smaller number of records that actually make it out into circulation, on final releases.
That’s what I was thinking of, thank you. How was it getting all of these illustrations, flyers, etc. Was it difficult?
I would not say it was difficult. I would say it was definitely time-consuming. I was really inspired by the Beastie Boys Book.
My copy is nearby.
I love that book. I love the scrapbook energy.
Also, a big part of it was that one dubstep doesn’t really have visual language. When you think about hip-hop, you think of graffiti, you think of Adidas, you think of RUN DMC, gold chains, shoes.
There’s visual signifiers that you think of when you think of other genres. Techno is hard-edged, Detroit, Underground Resistance, balaclavas, bomber jackets. But there’s not really a visual language for dubstep, and I was even thinking like the only way to do it is to literally show the physical artifacts of what it looked like at the time.
There was a lot of stylistic choices that I made. One is that they were scanned rough, so if there’s a roach edge torn out of a flyer, I leave it there. If a picture was taken on a physical film camera with a white border, I kept the white border.
I wanted to feel like my efforts were rewarded visually, because I physically collected this stuff, but also because I wanted to be able to trace how this the scene went from CDs, handwritten track lists, label inserts, physical flyers, and eventually throughout the book you actually see less and less of those physical items as it becomes a more online experience.
It certainly threw me back a lot to see these CD-Rs with handwriting on them. Another analogy that I’m thinking of here is the Blood & Fire label, which did CD reissues in the ’90s of reggae. They were packaged with a very textural eye, as well.
Actually, reggae is probably not a million miles [away], because a lot of the dubstep guys, most of them grew up on jungle and garage, and came to real dub reggae sound systems through jungle. Especially people like Mala and Coki, although they’re very much the yin yang. Like Coki makes rude-boy buzzsaw riffs from dub reggae and dancehall, and Mala is doing deep sound-system that almost comes from a Theo Parish broken-house percussive headspace. So that’s definitely present.
Kode9 and Wiley, Rinse FM (January 26, 2006)
Lauren in email: “The crossovers between grime and dubstep are a big topic, Kode9 is a leading figure.”
Let’s go to the next one. I had forgotten just how purely enjoyable Wiley can be to listen to. He’s so much fun. I remember a friend of mine who is now a DJ in Seattle referred to Wiley’s vocal style as “prissy.”
[laughs] I love that. I’ve never considered him as “prissy,” but that’s fucking really funny. It’s a great word. I’m sure he would deny it.
It’s not about him, I don’t think, as a person, just the crisp clipped-ness of his cadence.
Yes, it’s very matter-of-fact. Like, “This is how I’m doing it, so you can just listen and absorb.”
Did you hear that set, or these sets, as they appeared, or did you encounter this stuff retrospectively?
I did not listen to it live because I wasn’t in London. Rinse FM was an illegal station at the time. I probably wasn’t really tuning in that much, but it was certainly on YouTube reasonably quickly. This show was January of ’06, and YouTube launched in [2005]. I’m pretty sure I would have heard it the same year [it came out] because I was very much into dubstep and grime at the same time. I think I heard this reasonably promptly.
That crossover is interesting, especially in the States, where we’re getting this stuff thirdhand. I was a big fan of this stuff early on. When I was going through the book, I’d completely forgotten about Horsepower Productions’ In Fine Style. I bought that album when it came out, so I’ve been following it from a distance for a long time. But you’re in the living rooms in a real way with this book. What was your relationship as a listener with the pirates?
I’m going to be honest. Unless you were in London, you were not picking up that signal live. You would be getting things second- and thirdhand. Either you would be on the Dubstep Forum, and people would upload mixes. There were websites like Barefiles, where they in London would be recording those signals and then uploading the mixes later.
So, my relationship with pirates was not that I was sitting in a car in London, smoking a cigarette, listening live. My experience of that, like so many other people in the book—the people that would have listened through the Dubstep Forum and Deapoh of Barefiles. I was of the generation where I was trying my hardest to consume as much as I could.
I actually worked in a record shop called Fopp around this time. It was an independent record-store brand, a high-street chain in the UK. Straight out of high school, I worked there for a year. Myself and one other guy, we started talking, and I was like, “Oh, I really like this dubstep stuff,” and he was like, “Oh shit, me too! We should buy CDs in and build a dubstep section.” So I did that at Fopp with this dude.
But it was interesting at the time, because there was, like you talked about, the “paucity of records.” If you were going to be a shop selling CDs, there really weren’t that many commercially available CDs for dubstep. If anything, there was a hunger for the sound.
But if you did not live in London and you were not going to the raves and listening to the pirates, it was actually [what] your experience was: What’s commercially available on CD? What shows can I rip online? And then of course, eventually: What kind of parties can I go to? Is somebody going to burn their money and put something on in my town?
The spread of dubstep through the UK—I think Depot described it as the “neural pathways in the brain.” You could see the traffic on Barefiles traveling across the UK in real time.
The book brings all of that back.
Yes. And I think the dubstep story is the story of a transition from a physical infrastructure to a digital infrastructure, and how that affects a genre. I was right in the middle of that, as somebody into the sound at the time, but not living in London.
And how it builds an audience.
Exactly.
Skream feat. Mala and Chef, Stella Sessions (Rinse FM, March 14, 2006)
Lauren in email: “Pirate radio culture, the sheer volume of hits being generated within a 2-year period; also this recording, though imperfect, does capture the environmental noise of being inside a session—it’s not just a straight rip from the decks.”
It is crazy to think about how different Skream has become as a DJ. I saw him a couple of years ago in Minneapolis. It was a fun show, but it was put on by a pretty mainstream dance promoter here in town, nothing wrong with that, and the audience was coming to what they would call EDM from the pop route. I’m not criticizing them at all, but that audience would not know how to react to this set.
The Skream one: There are so many . . . Skream, for example, did one of I think the second Rinse FM commercially available mix CDs [Rinse: 02, 2007]. It’s an excellent mix CD. If anything, I could have quite easily chosen it as well.
But the reason I specifically chose this is, one, I think it’s really good. Obviously, we’re talking about how things are shared online and how they get allure and travel online. I actually think this recording is a pretty decent one, not just of the sets that are played, but [at evoking] the ambiance of being in a pirate-radio studio.
You can hear people opening cans of beer and chit-chatting and smoking in the back. I really like that you can hear someone fucking up the mix, or there’s like the fuzzy signal because somebody’s Nokia 3210 is getting a text saying “Shout out Dave from Brentford.” I’ve actually put that on in the background before and just listened to the whole thing as if it was the broadcast.
But I picked that one because the Stella Sessions that he did: Youngsta had a show called Minimal Mondays, Skream did the Stella Sessions. In the book, Plastician has a line: “It didn’t matter if I fucked up a blend because I would leave the station and nobody would ever hear that show again.” I like that lack of self-consciousness. It’s loose, it’s silly. If someone’s enjoying the tune, play it three times. If you’re not, dash off, put the next one on.
And there’s just . . . like we were talking about, the “paucity of records” again. It’s actually a phrase I really like. I can keep using this. There is a wealth in the sheer volume of music that was being made at the time—but so little of it was formally released. These pirate sets on YouTube are sometimes the last place that you could hear those beats.
If anything, this kind of archiving of pirate radio is really essential to remember how somebody used to DJ. Maybe not in their finest moment, maybe after a few spliffs and a few cans of Red Stripe. But even just . . . [playing] like a dub version of his own track that never got released. If I listen to this show, I can hear that blend, and it feels so contemporary.
There is also a key difference between the dubplate culture of drum & bass in the earlier nineties, where it’s all vinyl. Tapes are being made, but not necessarily distributed. It takes a while for some of those pirate tapes to gain mass. With dubstep, it didn’t take that long, because they were putting them right up online.
Yes, exactly.
Mala b2b Loefah feat. Sgt Pokes, FWD (June 1, 2006)
Lauren in email: “Great session from FWD, featuring a well-known MC—I wanted to get a live club mix in here.”
The other thing about that Skream mix, and it’s true of the Mala-Loefah as well: Super minimalist, super focused, very much like you were talking about with Youngsta. A claim on a specific area; a claim that this very narrow but powerful lane is what we are going to do.
I also picked this one specifically because, one, I think it’s a genuinely good example of what it would be like to go to FWD >> in that period. It also achieves a few things. One, they had already launched their own DMZ party by this point. In the book, the chapter is “The Seismic Impact”: 2006 is the true breakthrough year.
Yes, three of these sets are from then.
Yeah, but each three are quite different. There is the Mary Anne Hobbs Dubstep Warz broadcast, January ’06. DMZ first-birthday dance is March ’06. YouTube launches in [2005]. This stuff gets disseminated so much faster. So, this is the real on-ramp here, and you can really hear it—there is such a swagger and a confidence in how they’re doing this set. They have a very specific lane within dubstep: this low-end half-step sound.
But actually, it’s like a triple yin-yang here—like a triangle here—because Mala is this deep half-step sonic-voodoo-dread element. Loefah is the disgruntled junglist who wants to slow it all down and smash it apart over a Guinness and a zoot. And Pokes is the host. Rather than at other events at FWD>>, you would get grime MCs turning up and spitting on dubstep tracks. You’ll get Skepta would come down and spit over a Jammer set, and he’s playing “Midnight Request Line.” It’s the vibes blend of dubstep and grime, and it’s really magical.
Whereas a grime MC would come to FWD>> with quite different intentions. He’d turn up and everyone go: “The grime MC is here!” It would be a guest-star moment, and everyone would be very captivated by that. It’s about their lyricism. It’s the vocal performance, and the DJ and the producer are the supporting act.
Whereas with Pokes, he is the host in the same way that a DJ or an old-school dub sound system would be. He is encouraging the atmosphere of the room. He’s reacting to the records. He’s engendering an atmosphere of togetherness, and that is what like Pokes’s style is in the set.
I also liked the idea that FWD>> was, as somebody puts it, Funktion-1 music, and also iPod music. Those two things do not seem to go to go together, and yet I think that’s exactly right. People were listening to this music either on a huge system, or completely on their headphones.
Interesting. I feel like, if anything, when you’re talking about going from physical infrastructure to digital infrastructure, Mala said, “This is a physical sound, and you have to be physically located to really understand it.”
In that shift, once people start having more casual home listening, like iPods and like inner ear headphones for this music, if anything, you start to lose that. I don’t want to say it’s moving into a negative, because I would want always want people to be able to experience music in whichever way they reasonably can. But you start to understand why the low-end tracks don’t translate as well to personal headphone listening.
That’s why a like a younger generation or others that aren’t part of that very core DMZ fold, who are not purists but specialists, start saying, “Well, this isn’t translating digitally, so I’m going to make tracks that are more mid-range, more high-impact stuff that you can really pick up on, like headphones and little iPod speakers.” Like with all music genres, the technologies of the time massively impact what actually gets made.
N-Type, Dubstep Allstars Vol. 5 (Tempa CD, rel. May 14, 2007)
Lauren in email: “The Caspa and Rusko Fabriclive 37 mix is famous, but I think this also shows the turning point towards a more hyped, dynamic sound and rapid mixing style. I think it’s probably the best in the Allstars series besides 01 and 02, IMHO.”
Which brings us, I think, to N-Type. The swarming B-line starts to really become the focal point, I think, on this one. It’s plainly an evolution from, just to stay within the selection here, Vol. 2. How do you see the evolution of the Dubstep All Stars series as a whole?
Oh, I love it! There were so [few] commercially available mixes. Also, because Tempa, the original label in that regard—I think, because they owned the publishing and the distribution of all these tracks, they had a wealth of stuff to work with. And they were so trusted that they got an incredible amount of music cleared to even be on these mixes. Although I would probably dispute the thoroughness of certain accountings over the years.
But I would say that the series itself is a is basically a blow-by-blow account of how the styles of DJing evolved, and the styles of music that were played throughout the period. It’s 2003 to 2013, so it’s a perfect ten-year period for this, Allstars; the N-Type one lands 2007.
Also, the Caspa & Rusko FabricLive mix comes out. Now, that’s a very well-discussed one. It’s obviously discussed at length in the book. It had an enormous impact in the States, especially. But I would say that, actually, the N-Type one is probably my one of my favorites of the series.
N-Type was particularly good at playing quite busy, very dynamic, buzzsaw-riffy kind of dubstep, and mixing it quite fast, in a way that . . . before, there’d be quite long, slow—sorry to use the phrase: tectonic-plate-shifting blends. He’s mixing it almost like the rave-megamix style: very sharp blends.
I think it was starting at that point [when] the smoking ban had come [to] the UK, so people couldn’t smoke weed in the dance anymore. People shifted over to different kinds of drugs, so their relationship to how the music was being played and presented changed. They wanted things that are more high-impact, more dynamic things that really kept you in the room instead of going outside for a cigarette.
By this point, the sound easily has been around for at least six solid years. You can’t just keep flogging half-step to death. That has to go in another direction. Naturally, people are going to go, “Well, it can’t get slower and it can’t get bassier.” There has to be an on-ramp to something more dynamic and filled out and aggressive.
I feel like there is much to be criticized for the different directions that [dubstep] eventually went. But I do think this N-Type mix is probably my favorite mix of this particular turning point in the sound. I would drop-kick a small child to some of these blends. I feel like I could sprint past Usain Bolt. I would be the Kool-Aid Man running through the wall. It almost has the energy of a grime mix. It’s very dynamic, like aggressive, dubstep.
And that is basically what America picked up on.
Yes, big-time.
Stay tuned for the rest of our conversation tomorrow!