Kode9 + The Spaceape
Memories Of The Future

Dubstep, or the new genre. Synonymous in the year 2006 with hype (whatever that may mean). A fuss? I couldn't say, primarily because it’s not an invention of the press.

Dubstep (perhaps without a name or definition) has been the latest dance trend for some years now in South London. And now it is poised to expand, to conquer other and higher audiences. Thanks to the perseverance of the artists, but also (is it possible otherwise?) to the interest of many magazines. But don't think that dubstep is just dance music, not suitable for attentive, conscious, and evocative listening, even with headphones or in your own room.

The base of this sound is clearly Jamaican in origin, but an urbanized upbeat music. We could follow a very precise line of antecedents: the dub brought to rainy England by Linton Kwesi Johnson and cleaned of all embellishments, the melancholic trip-hop of Massive Attack, a beathip-hop with some electronic reminiscences. All of this is abundantly infused with lo-fi crackles and glitchy runs.

Kode9 is one of the young maestros, one of the most propulsive minds: balancing between contamination, tradition, and technoid aesthetics. While the latter remains well-present and necessary for perfecting a still artisanal sound, tradition yields part of the scene in favor of contamination.

A contamination that also manifests through giving the lyrics to The Spaceape, a sort of new space-age Linton Kwesi (the name suggests it too): in fact, this "Memories Of the Future" is the first not entirely instrumental album (mostly it is actually recited) of the dubstep scene. Not only that, Kode9's production work is perfect in its essentialness, open to melody and captivating: of the original Jamaican sound, only some hidden feedback remains under a slow and inexorable beat (clean in its sloppiness), but suddenly the melody appears. Barely hinted at, okay, but it is still a melody. And in music with such potential, with an impulse so cosmic, realize what even just a fleeting melody…

Well, certainly brings it closer to perfection. To the eternity of the cornerstones (and it’s easy to cite, thanks to the wonderful cover as well as certain atmospheres, great cyber-punk works like Blade Runner or Neuromancer).