A few weeks back The Lex alerted me to this as part of a raft of stuff he was calling, somewhat reluctantly, “post-dubstep”. Not his coinage, but I was immediately heartened. Not only was the music excellent I also knew that no matter what I ended up writing about it, no matter how airily uninformed I sound, I could not make it sound more rubbish than “post-dubstep” seems to imply.
I mean, consider “post-punk” and “post-rock”: in each of these the transformation “post” implies something artier, more forbidding, perhaps wider-ranging, perhaps drier than the root genre. And if that root genre is the often barely welcoming dubstep, then “post-dubstep” seems to suggest something so forbiddingly arid your tongue starts to shrivel just thinking of it.
Not that I know what I’d call the music Lex was talking about – made by producers like Joker and Guido – but arid this isn’t: in fact it’s the lushest sound going. It’s dominated by huge thick videogame keyboard tones, blocky and primary-coloured, ripe and welcoming, laid over equally juicy bass.
And having said that, this track – my very favourite track he pointed me to – is not much like that. You get the bass in “Boksd” – which isn’t on Subeena’s Myspace, but worth tracking down on her recent EP. But those sweet-toothed keyboards aren’t there: no, “Boksd” is straight up IDM to my ears, “intelligent techno” as we used to call it (not always the most apt of names). It’s all poise and shimmer and flow, the sort of thing Future Sound of London might have put out as a single back when they still cared about low end, or which might have shown up on an early-90s Warp records release. Obviously this absolutely presses my nostalgia button, but if Zomby’s allowed to play the time machine card I don’t see why the non-hardcore shouldn’t have fun with it too.