I’ve had dub techno on the mind lately. I don’t know exactly when or why, but sometime last year I began thinking about engaging critically with the genre, in an active sense. It’s a funny one: a lifelong love, at least since I discovered it in the late 1990s, yet it’s also not a sound that I listen to terribly often. In part, I think that’s because the great albums are so great, my instinct is to save them for special occasions (the same way I feel about records like Autechre’s Amber, which I adore, yet rarely put on).
But part of it, too, is that I’ve been wanting to hear dub techno in mixed form, the better to sink into its velvety expanse. And maybe, too, the better to make sense of it, because something about dub techno feels pre- or non-linguistic to me. The qualities that characterize the best dub techno defy description, taking place at the level of timbre, of suggestion. Here’s another thought: To really wrap my head around dub techno, I wanted to break out of the album format, because I wanted to explore how much variety is possible from a sound that’s too easily reduced to its most essential elements. I wanted to set a wide range of approaches in conversation with each other. And so, for a good chunk of last year, I harbored a desire to take my own stab at mixing it.
During the holiday lull, I finally found some time to do something about it. I’d been building out a mammoth playlist of dub techno favorites in my local digital library, and last week I picked out a hundred or so particularly good tracks and sorted them into three different playlists according to their relative energy. (“Ambient,” “Softer,” and “Heavier,” in case you’re wondering what my rubric looks like.) Finally, on Saturday, my wife and daughter were off doing something, so I spent a few hours wrestling with Rekordbox (the Most Cursed Software Ever Created™), burned a USB, and plugged in for a little mix-up.
I didn’t go into it thinking that it was something I’d share; it was just a practice session, a first attempt at getting my hands around the stuff. But it ended up sounding good enough—I’ve listened back a handful of times now, including during a long session at the gym today, and to be honest, the more I listen, the more I like it—that I’ve decided to post it.
It didn’t turn out like I expected. I’d expected to lean more heavily on classics, for one thing—to thoroughly survey the canon as established by Basic Channel, Pole, Deepchord, STL, all the Chain Reaction artists, et al. But to stick too narrowly to the canon felt too pro forma. Plus, I wanted to let each track dictate where I went next based on purely sonic criteria—tempo, timbre, density, intensity. I wanted to float across the stuff, rather than follow a predetermined path. And since, in the act of mixing, I found myself looking for ways to balance continuity with variety, I ended up hopscotching across decades more than I expected to.
The result is anything but a canonical dub techno mix. In fact, the dub techno quotient of certain selections herein is probably debatable. (Is the Baby Ford track included here dub techno? You tell me!) There are some bona fide classics, from artists like Vainqueur, Rhythm & Sound, Vladislav Delay, even Kit Clayton. There are also some major exclusions (Basic Channel, Pole, Deepchord, STL). But the flow, IMO, works. It start off ambient, turns surprisingly—to me, anyway—tough, and then drifts back down to earth via an extended denouement.
The act of putting together this mix has reminded me that there’s room for many more such mixes—dub techno will not easily be extinguished. So there will be more, though for the moment I can’t say if that will be next month or a year from now, when I’ve finally carved out another few free hours over the holiday break.
In the meantime, here’s this. Fully downloadable, 90 minutes long; SoundCloud embed and tracklisting after the jump.
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