That dubstep thing, like ten years never happened.
The Bug – Fire
Clubroot – Surface Tension IV
Melodic bass-heavy electronic music, post-dubstep if you will. It’s a beautiful soothing experience. I don’t feel the sci-fi that the liner notes say and the cover’s aesthetic suggests, much more the love and the delicate connection nature of it that the cover’s subject depicts. So it’s not exactly how it looks but rather what it shows.
Pessimist – Pessimist
Darkish drum and bass, medium tempo. Not for the dancefloor but for headphones. Could be sci-fi but I’d rather think of cityscapes than empty space.
Hugo Massien – Metamorphosis
Bass-heavy slow to mid tempo electronic music. Genrewise it’s a mishmash: the highest percentage is probably house, but it’s changing every other track to dubstep, breakbeat, house, IDM, ambient. Good backdrop for work.
Cassius Select – Heavyweight
Bass-heavy mid-tempo broken beat. The track Honda Civic is a dubstep candy.
Skream – Unreleased Classics Vol.1 2002-2003
I’ve just watched the All My Homies Hate Skrillex video essay (pretty good, btw) and got in the mood to listen to some oldschool classics. That’s when I stumbled upon this Skream collection of some unreleased goodies from back in the day. This is also pretty good, btw. Dubstep like I remember.
Sumgii feat. Nah Eeto – Wanawake
This is a single release but made enough plays that it’s worth making a note of. Post-dubstep bass music, reminds me of the collaborations of The Bug and Warrior Queen. And another record building the bridge between Europe and Africa, this one stretching between the UK and Kenya.
Throwing Snow – Mosaic
After last year’s Loma I am traveling backwards in the Throwing Snow discography, and it’s a great trip. At this album I’m stuck for a while now, I keep re-listening it and it just doesn’t clear from my Listen Next playlist. It gives me the goosebumps at certain points, has magical moods, it’s like electronic music with a soul. It’s like Apparat with a more firm grip on the beats, little more weight on sounds, doesn’t take so much care to take all steps with a soft feet. I imagine a creature sliding on ice; it runs to gain impetus, starts off with a quick and light slide, then jumps to feet ending in metal hoofs and slams it on the ice, carving a streak but still moving forward like it was unstoppable.
Silk Road Assassins – State Of Ruin
The first EP I called ambient electronic, this one expands that with dubstep and moody melodies. Interestingly the track Taste of Metal was probably aimed to be a heavy hitting grime spitter, but listening to the vocal version I guess it’s lucky that the album features the instrumental one. No words are needed on this record, really. It’s much better as a music-only backdrop soundtrack for a dark room with dim light.
Lorn – Remnant
I don’t really know how to label these albums anymore. When Loren appeared on Brainfeeder it was easy and obvious to call it dubstep not just because of the music but because it was those times. Then in the Ninja Tune years it was still related to that scene. But then the dubstep bunch dissolved and some started creating techno, others house, and then some continued this sort of evolution of dubstep into something like bass-dominated darkish ambient, which I wouldn’t call ambient per se, but I just don’t know what to call it.
Discogs labels this latest Lorn album simply as experimental, but I don’t think it’s experimental at all in a sense how I see a Pansonic record or something by Sakamoto being experimental electronics. Remnant has a lot of melodies, easy-to-listen textures, some beatless pieces but many with mid-tempo rhythm. This is not experimental at all, this is completely approachable and easy to digest even if it is for a specific taste – but that’s true for all sorts of music.
Nowadays I tend to consider these simply electronic music. Maybe add “atmospheric” as most of them could fit as a soundtrack for any movie, game or live performance. Bit dark but then not, bit ambient but then not, bit experimenting but then not, bit triphopish but then not. I am thinking of labelling these as IDM again, which feels weird because I have very specific moods attached to that genre because of Planet Mu, Plaid and such from the late ’90s and early ’00s, but the philosophy of that music and those releases are closest to what I feel now. So, all that said, we could call Lorn’s Remnant a modern, bass-oriented, moody IDM record.
Or this is dubstep still. It’s just that this is what dubstep sounds like 10-15 years in. (And probably I had come to this realization a few times in the past decade.)