Pitchfork 2008 End of Year round up...

[grievous_angel]

I like the term wonky

Thanks for putting Lady Dub in the top 10.

Big up blackdown each and every. Shame he couldn't plug his own album cos it was the best CD of the year IMO.

[pete_bubonic]

I must agree with Mr. Angel above. In a year that delivered so many artists albums, few if any warranted more than one or two tracks getting regular play from me. Dusk and blackdown's album is the first to really catch my attention and keep it. The first album that actually engaged in story telling and not being a collection of the latest bangers as many of the scene leaders albums have appeared to me. more respect to blackdown for not mentioning it though and keeping the ethics high.

I'm too sure about his use of Wonky and the divisions here. More or less becasue wonky should inherently have some kind of wonky syncopation ala Rustie and Hudmo, a follow on from Madlib and J-Dilla. joker and gemmy don't use this, and I don't think the use of g-synth whines and piercing leads makes it 'wonky'.

I do reckon the inclusion of funky is important because quite simply, funky is going to have more of an effect on grime and dubstep than anything else. It is quite simply the re emergence of garage.

[dubway]

Joker - "Digidesign" [Hyperdub]

i seee

[slothrop]

its possible to be danceable and innovative - a recent distance set I witnessed at the west indian centre demonstrated this well with some real upbeat distorted stuff and more meditative tunes together

Personally I find that diversity and innovation actually go hand in hand with making me go absolutely fucking insane on a dancefloor.

Re that quote about the state of dubstep - yeah, I pretty much agree with it. On the other hand, there are a lot of people out there who want to hear good uncomplicated midrangey kill-your-parents music played very loudly, and a) I can't really claim that they have no right to listen to what they want to listen to and b) there are enough of them that even if all the big DJs somehow close ranks and maintain a super high standard of 'quality control' (possibly not even based on their personal idea of 'quality') then someone with a stack of dub police tunes will step up DJing them, someone with a bunch of synths will start writing similar tunes, and someone with a bit of spare cash will release them, all to rapturous response from everyone who wants a big pile of wobble to brock out to.

TBH there's nothing much I can see that's going to stop dubstep turning into a big genre with a mainstream that I find boring and a lot of really interesting stuff going on to one side. We're not going to make the whole scene guestlist only or anything to make sure everyone involved is "true to the original spirit of dubstep". I'd worry more about supporting the people doing the interesting stuff at the fringes and keeping those parts of the scene together with a sense of community and interaction and excitement rather than a feeling of a few isolated islands doing their own thing to two blokes and a dog in the middle of a sea of dull stuff before getting the arse and going off to make funky.

[corpsey]

It's good that funky is in the same ballpark tempo wise as dubstep/garage/techno etc. It means that DJs can pick and choose what they want from dubstep if the genre as a whole begins to go stale for them.

''this implies that their only purpose might be to make people dance, rather than contain any innovative content. skream, coki and jakes tunes, amongst others, are wildly innovative sonically and structurally, even while some of their tracks are total dancefloor wreckers''

Unfortunately it isn't just skream, coki and jakes making those tunes though - and in some sets nowadays all you're going to hear is that type of tune. And as innovative as they might be sonically etc... a lot of them use precisely the same synth sounds in almost exactly the same way. It's true, though, that a lot of 'deeper' tunes are seen as experimental when actually they're a lot more conventional than wobble tunes. A good balance of the two can be found, though - Anti Social spring to my mind : tunes with depth, groove etc. which are also as upbeat and dancefloor friendly as any Skream tune.

[reptilian]

Unfortunately it isn't just skream, coki and jakes making those tunes though

[reptilian]

thats true

i wouldnt say that coki, jakes and skream use exactly the same synth sounds in exactly the same way though (not sure if you're saying this)

to be fair coki seems to innovate in bursts of tunes that sound similiar. i remember just before spongebob and goblin and 666 and all them appeared everyone was saying all his tunes sounded like bloodthirst.

surely no-one could deny cokis ability to create dancefloor slaying tunes that are also sonically interesting??

i guess overall my point is that its incredible when these kind of tunes when they are done amazingly well, and you are just drawing attention to the fact that its amazingly lame when they are done badly, no?

guess i just wanted to defend the producers who are making this type of music well. i think it would be really crap if people didnt appreciate these artists just because of the people who mindlessly copy them

[corpsey]

i wouldnt say that coki, jakes and skream use exactly the same synth sounds in exactly the same way though (not sure if you're saying this)

...surely no-one could deny cokis ability to create dancefloor slaying tunes that are also sonically interesting??

Nah, not saying that. Those three producers have all got their own style (in Skream's case, probably a bit harder to isolate nowadays when he's making tunes in such a variety of styles). You could say that Jakes, for example, has obviously been strongly influenced by Coki, but a tune like '3kout' doesn't sound like a cheap knock-off 'Spongebob'. It's got Jakes' own style imprinted on it.

guess i just wanted to defend the producers who are making this type of music well. i think it would be really crap if people didnt appreciate these artists just because of the people who mindlessly copy them

Yeah, this is the problem - Coki's tunes actually suffer because of this, for me. If 'Spongebob'/'666' etc. hadn't been so influential I'd probably like them a lot more.

I dunno, I suppose a lot of people absolutely love these tunes, I'm just personally not into that style as much. If you are into those tunes I suppose a whole set of that kind of tune is going to be like a wet dream come true, I just get fucking bored after about 2 tunes like that.

I've been wondering recently if my arguments about how innovative/copycat these tunes are actually what my feelings about 'wobble' come down to - maybe its just that I don't like that kind of tune and if I did I wouldn't care how many people made it. Maybe if I liked that style I'd notice a lot more differences between tracks too? After all, if you're not into jungle, for example, it probably all sounds incredibly similar and samey - Amen + 808s + rasta sample, that kind of thing. I understand the argument that says the synth/LFO manipulations in wobble tunes are almost like the breakbeat manipulations in jungle.

To draw an obvious comparison, maybe its like when jungle became more and more dominated by 2-step and a lot of junglists defected to garage or elsewhere. When I listen to late 90s DNB I hear a lot of brilliant tunes, but I can see why someone who got into jungle first would be disenchanted with it - there isn't as much rhythmic complexity, its much faster, much colder etc etc.

I wouldn't be surprised if dubstep kept going successfully, but I think a lot of the first/second/third (whatever) generation of heads are probably going to lose interest if they haven't already. It probably already happened with a lot of the people who were into it when it was Horsepower/El-B etc. when it became dominated by half-step.

That's probably just the way things go.

fucking hell, this is like the textual equivalent of one of my pilled up rants at a soul jazz night

[slothrop]

I wouldn't be surprised if dubstep kept going successfully, but I think a lot of the first/second/third (whatever) generation of heads are probably going to lose interest if they haven't already. It probably already happened with a lot of the people who were into it when it was Horsepower/El-B etc. when it became dominated by half-step.

That's probably just the way things go.

Cf my previous post, though.

And I guess that as much as we complain about the interesting bits of the sound getting marginalized, the scene is so big these days that its margins are probably bigger than the whole scene was back in 2005 - I dunno, compare the amount of stuff coming out on Hessle and Punchdrunk, whatever now with the amount coming out on Tempa and Big Apple then. What might play out differently from jungle / dnb is that now we've got this internet thingy and everyone and his dog is on it, so there's a way for people who don't neccessarily like the mainstream of the sound to get together and realize that they aren't the only people in the scene who want something different and have their own parties and release their own tunes...

[corpsey]

Yeah, that's true. I think actually the only thing that I'd really miss is that sense of a unified scene and big nights where the music had a bit of depth to it. Reading the reports on here about the latest DMZ worries me a little, although to be fair I wasn't there and I've read similar reports in the past about DMZs and then been to DMZs following that that have been absolutely brilliant.

And the dubstep scene has been great - all the people I've met at nights, all the DJs and producers, chatting breeze on this forum... It'd be a shame to lose that community vibe.

[slothrop]

Yeah, that's true. I think actually the only thing that I'd really miss is that sense of a unified scene and big nights where the music had a bit of depth to it. Reading the reports on here about the latest DMZ worries me a little, although to be fair I wasn't there and I've read similar reports in the past about DMZs and then been to DMZs following that that have been absolutely brilliant.

And the dubstep scene has been great - all the people I've met at nights, all the DJs and producers, chatting breeze on this forum... It'd be a shame to lose that community vibe.

There seems to be a bit of a community building up around not-just-wobblestep stuff, though. Probably helped by the fact that we can all get together online and get over-excited about Martyn tunes before we meet up in clubs and shout "WHAT WAS THAT???" at each other...

[corpsey]

Or, more likely, moan on and on and on at each other about the state of dubstep in 2008 heheheh

[4linehaiku]

I like the breakdown of the top singles:
Kode9 vs. LD: "Bad" [Hyperdub]
Darkstar: "Need You"/"Squeeze My Lime" [Hyperdub]
Zomby: Zomby EP [Hyperdub]
Ikonika: "Please" [Hyperdub]
Joker: "Digidesign" [Hyperdub]
2000F & JKamata: "You Don't Know What Love Is" [Hyperdub]

And I wouldn't be at all surprised if a few of the unreleased ones end up on Hyperdub too. http://www.competition-commission.org.uk/ will be on to kode9 before you know it.

[duncanw]

i think the last thing this genre needs is to have interesting producers like that pushed into a different sub genre.

That's what I was thinking. If you partition Zomby and Ikonika away in the "wonky" corner, then yep, there's less inventiveness to point to in dubstep.

Why not create a similar, teeny-tiny scene for Appleblim, Peverelist, 2562 and Headhunter, and another for Martyn, TRG and Pangaea? That way we could excise all the healthy stuff and leave the stinking corpse of dubstep to rot away in peace.

[blackdown]

I wouldn't be surprised if dubstep kept going successfully, but I think a lot of the first/second/third (whatever) generation of heads are probably going to lose interest if they haven't already.

people (not particularly you Corps), need to have a serious think about the implications of this for dubstep, while replacing the word "heads" with "A-list producers," because the list of A-list producers who say to me privately "oh you know, i havent made much recently because i'm not really feeling most dubstep right now..." is getting worringly long.

[corpsey]

That's interesting/depressing. In DNB you can tell there are some old producers/DJs who are obviously not that bothered about DNB anymore but keep chugging along making average tunes and playing average (but crowd pleasing) sets because I suppose they rely on it financially or something.

I've seen a few dubstep sets where I've been wondering if the person DJing can really be into what they're playing... I wonder if I was ever right about that haha

[pompende]

And I guess that as much as we complain about the interesting bits of the sound getting marginalized, the scene is so big these days that its margins are probably bigger than the whole scene was back in 2005 -

yes. i think there is a lot more emotional breadth in the scene now. Margins Music, Router, the Martyn bits, the Joker tings... I'm not sure I would have ever imagined such diversity when I started listening to this stuff...

And the dubstep scene has been great - all the people I've met at nights, all the DJs and producers, chatting breeze on this forum... It'd be a shame to lose that community vibe.

+1

the list of A-list producers who say to me privately "oh you know, i havent made much recently because i'm not really feeling most dubstep right now..." is getting worringly long.

shit...

[staypuft]

I wouldn't be surprised if dubstep kept going successfully, but I think a lot of the first/second/third (whatever) generation of heads are probably going to lose interest if they haven't already.

people (not particularly you Corps), need to have a serious think about the implications of this for dubstep, while replacing the word "heads" with "A-list producers," because the list of A-list producers who say to me privately "oh you know, i havent made much recently because i'm not really feeling most dubstep right now..." is getting worringly long.

bring them out to a funky night

[slothrop]

I wouldn't be surprised if dubstep kept going successfully, but I think a lot of the first/second/third (whatever) generation of heads are probably going to lose interest if they haven't already.

people (not particularly you Corps), need to have a serious think about the implications of this for dubstep, while replacing the word "heads" with "A-list producers," because the list of A-list producers who say to me privately "oh you know, i havent made much recently because i'm not really feeling most dubstep right now..." is getting worringly long.

OTOH it's the A-list producers who you'd expect to be actually producing the good stuff. Maybe more worrying if they're saying "whenever I do a tune I'm really into it flops on the clubs compared to when I crank out yet another generic wobbler." This is kind of why I can see positive steps going on with people getting together and setting up nights where people go crazy when someone drops their latest minimal socastep experiment or showcases their new underwater grime sound rather than banging on more predictable halfstep. And tbh bigging up those people and supporting their work and going to their nights seems to be the most positive option available.

Because really, what else can Joe Public do? Start fights with people in clubs for not being into the right sort of music? Wear 'just say no to derivative wobble' T-shirts? Moan constantly on the internet about how things aren't as good as they used to be? Because your article, though great in many respects, is a bit long on how dubstep is going to hell in a handcart if people don't Do Something About It, but a bit short on what we the punters can actually do beyond wring our hands and complain...

[blackdown]

Because your article, though great in many respects, is a bit long on how dubstep is going to hell in a handcart if people don't Do Something About It, but a bit short on what we the punters can actually do beyond wring our hands and complain...

wordcount on the lows in dubstep in '08 = 340
wordcount on the highs in dubstep in '08 = 1009

and anyway what people can do is what people have been doing in DIY scenes since time immorial: write their own beats, start their own radio show, pick different tunes to DJ with, start their own night, release their own tunes, go their own way.....