Music

Since its birth around five years ago, the vibrant, ever evolving – and fast emerging – dubstep scene has revealed the distinctively different production styles of its various players. Dubstep’s roots are in early jungle and old-skool dub, but producers may also draw from deep house and garage , ragga and bashment, even jazz and film soundtracks, while their mood palette runs the gamut from bright ’n’ bouncy to dark and deeply meditative.

Camberwell’s Kode9 belongs very much at the moody end of the spectrum. The debut LP by the chief of Hyperdub (which also recently issued the brilliant Burial album) is a masterpiece of queasy listening – 14 episodes of dubby illbience so deeply absorbing it’s as if they bypass the ear and are being transmitted directly to the brain. Muffled and monstrous sub bass dominates, sometimes reassuring as a heartbeat, at others threatening as a nuclear thrum, while skanking rhythms and deep-space echoes are a constant. The Spaceape’s darkly hypnotic and rich, almost sticky, patois-drenched poetics up the paranoia ante, yet his visions of a dystopian, sci-fi-determined future are curiously calming. Full of dread in both senses of the word, ‘Memories Of The Future’ is set to become a modern classic.