Dubstep

Rumble Seat (Episode 3)

Dubstep, Rumble Seat

Try as I might, I cannot seem to shake Terravita’s Up In The Club out of my head.

Terravita – Up In The Club (Clip)

It recently came on the radio as I was driving around with my aunt, and I don’t think she gets it. I’m not surprised that most people won’t appreciate it. Not because it’s a particularly-challenging piece of music, but because listening to it is like receiving a tongue-bath from an exuberantly-affectionate tiger. The main melody should be soundtracking an 8-bit dungeon of unconquerable magnitude.

While this adamant edge may serve a niche market in bass music, it is undeniably a highly-visible one. Aggression, or apparent aggression, tends to raise a few eyebrows. But I don’t see it as actively confrontational, like a strike fighter scouring an agrarian township for targets.

No.

I imagine it like a dragon lazing dreamily by a volcanic vent. Or a fuzzy, deadly-poisonous caterpillar. Passively dangerous. Although, if you consider yourself an agent of the imperial banality that Serj Tankian rightly described as “plastic existence”, then I concede that either one might seem just as threatening.

It’s for precisely this reason that I’m glad this razor-toothed motif isn’t a blanket for the entire genre. We’re all varied individuals, so I see no reason to terrify anyone into thinking otherwise.

Maybe this is why I have fallen in love with NumberNin6. To borrow an easily-accessible and cliché commonplace, his tracks paint with all the colours of the wind. Garbage is triumphantly abrasive, like covering the last, hard hundred miles with only second gear, while Absolve is like taking a satisfyingly-narcotic tube ride on a chocolate-strawberry milkshake in the heat of a still summer’s afternoon. It’s nearly impossible to pick a favourite, but seeing as I am forcing myself to do it, it’ll have to be Nebulous.

NumberNin6 – Nebulous

Like a smoke grenade spiked with salvia, it’s brutally transcendent. It’s like a deal with the devil. It sounds great and seems increasingly reasonable the more you listen to it, which only makes it more terrifying.

While that would be a deliciously-cryptic thought on which to end, I have begun to establish something of a pattern of posting three tracks. At the moment, I’m only at one and a third. Although I’m rounding it up to two. Because I make the rules here.

That being said, I’ve been wanting to mention The Others’ Off The Wall and Sluggo & Symbl’s Sharks Don’t Sleep, but had no idea how I would work them in with anything resembling artistry. Seeing as I’ve just surrendered my pursuit of that to the necessity of lunch and laundry, there’s definitely no time like the present to tackle this problem. Deciding between the two of them might have been difficult, but only one of them was on SoundCloud. And that seems like a legitimate tiebreaker to me.

Sluggo & Symbl – Sharks Don’t Sleep

Rumble Seat (Episode 2)

Burning Man, Dubstep, Glitch, Hip Hop, Progressive, Rumble Seat

Most of our lives will be spent missing amazing stuff. Hopefully because we’re too preoccupied with the other wonders around us.

Despite being aware of Mark Instinct’s existence, his talents haphazardly eluded my specific interest until alarmingly recently. That’s very unfortunate, because his remix of City Lights could have been a near-perfect anthem for Burning Man 2010, given the festival’s Metropolis theme.

Method Man & Redman feat. Bun B – City Lights (Mark Instinct & Symbl Bootleg)

The tenacious summon of Black Rock City has finally hit me. I don’t know if it was the facebook invite or the nostalgic perusal of Rockstar Librarian’s 2010 Music Guide, but something did it. I would have no qualms about returning to that frustratingly-magical moonscape, but it’s a commitment of a couple weeks and a couple grand. Which is a Brobdingnagian hurdle when I can’t even make my way out of my parents’ basement.

Although that’s not strictly true. I’m typing this in the basement, but I live in a room upstairs like a civilized member of the family. I say I live in the basement because it establishes a certain standard of intrigue. Basement dwellers might imagine themselves to be Dwarves or CHUDs. But, alas, it is a lie. I am not so mysterious. I’m just a dude who wants to get functionally drunk—or drunktional—in an enveloping dust while leering at sweat-polished hippie chicks.

That’s not the entirety, or even primary substance, of The Burn’s allure, though. It’s not in what you experience, or what you may likely experience again, but mostly what you don’t experience. The eponymous Burning Man, for example, was lit ablaze while themelondecoratif and I were having coffee with a crack team of hairstyling ninjas from Reno. And I have no regrets, because that surreal happenstance can never be replicated.

But another man will burn. I plan to see it, unless something else comes up. And I’m sure it will. I ignorantly missed R/D while committing myself to the merciless heckling of cyclists. Those hypocritical motherfuckers jump at the chance to be as inconsiderate of pedestrians on the playa as motorists are of them on public roads. Thankfully, this information superhighway accommodates us all, and it’s headlined my iPod with mixes from artists I missed in the desert.

Eastern Sun & Oscure – Third Eye High (R/D Remix)

I first encountered this sublime remix on Kraddy’s Dirty Got Soul, but due to the fact that it is woefully underlabelled in the track listing, I wasn’t able to correctly identify it until it showed up in R/D’s Forward Slash. Both mixes are superb, yet this track towers up out of them like, I don’t know, a gigantic burning man in the middle of a desert.  It’s definitely not to be missed. Trust the guy who missed the burning man and every set Jody Wisternoff played at the festival. He probably played this track, which I later discovered as the highlight of his Burning Man Mix:

Oliver Koletzki & Fran – Arrow & Bow (Marek Hemmann Remix)

The bassline gives the impression that you’ve been caught inside a wormhole and shrunk down to an infinitesimal point cycling back and forth through time along the release of an actual bowstring. Even though I could, I wouldn’t make it my mission to disagree with you if you posited the bassline as the track’s only innovative ace. But I wouldn’t need to, because the purpose of a good progressive track is not so much to surprise as it is to delight, and this one does so with supreme ease. Savour it long after your graduate-level reading skills have blown you past my closing thoughts.

As I move forward with this feature, I hope to remain entertaining while consistently presenting badass beats. While I am secretly confident in my ability to fail miserably at the former, I am—contrary to my initial fears—building a generous backlog of the latter.

Failing to share most of the world’s beauty with you, dear readers, will be my pleasure.

Rumble Seat (Episode 1)

Bassnectar, Datsik, Dubstep, ManMix, Rumble Seat

Split hairs. Call it Dubstep, Lazerbass, Glitchhop or Omnitempo Maximalism. It is a rose by any name.

There’s a new track from heavyweight producers Bassnectar and Datsik entitled Yes. It’s all over the internet, single-handedly driving up the value of tech stocks and compromising workplace productivity. Listen to it while you continue enjoying my delightful prose:

Bassnectar & Datsik – Yes

Thanks largely to music like what you’re now enjoying, I spent my summer creeping around bass-fueled festivals. Along the way, I was introduced to ManMix. “What’s ManMix?” you ask. Well:

It’s mostly booze!

At least that’s the party line.

But it’s so much more. ManMix is always on offer. Fundamentally, it’s about loving your fellow man unconditionally.

Yet, if I was the kind of person who went around making baseless generalizations about complete strangers, I’d say I get the sense that both Bassnectar and Datsik would (probably tactfully) not say “Yes” to the offer of ManMix. Bassnectar would be on some new age kick about his body being a temple and Datsik would be too much of a big shot. Thankfully, I am not the kind of person who makes such random and unfounded statements. It’s a petty, insecure asshole who says such things.

I don’t have a concrete plan for accomplishing this, but I hypothesize I can prove said asshole to be hopelessly wrong by getting Bassnectar and/or Datsik unreasonably wrecked on ManMix at some, unspecified, future date—next week, sixty years from now, whenever the opportunity arises. They’ve encouraged my happiness to such an extent that I feel I owe them at least that much.

So it pains me to admit that I have never been a yes man. It’s times like these when that reality is especially burdensome. I’m not of the opinion that Yes reflects either Bassnectar’s or Datsik’s best work. But it’s not a bad effort, either. As is the case with many of Bassnectar’s tracks, Yes grows on you, like a benign tumour nestling blissfully into your amygdala. And considering Bassnectar builds tracks with mixes in mind, I know better than to pass final judgment on his work until I’ve heard it in context.

Ultimately, Bassnectar and Datsik have both made enough indefatigable bangers that they’ve set an impossibly high bar for all their future endeavours. While still not their best work, these two currently-free downloads are cases in point:

Bassnectar feat. 40 Love – Wildstyle Method (Radio Edit)

The Crystal Method feat. LMFAO – Sine Wave (Datsik Remix)

Keep up the good work, boys.