Hyperdub is a record label that turns the DNA of electronic music inside out.
DNA is already a twisty, intertwined affair. Take a look at a double helix and you will see. So imagine that, all coiled and contorted and bent, twisted even more. From a certain angle it might be ugly or strange; from another, it might make for an arrangement more beautiful than can fully be explained. Either way, it will be complex, complicated and interconnected.
The label started 10 years ago from roots in the information stream. Hyperdub was originally a website devoted to developments in UK dance music as it evolved from the early cataclysms of rave into jungle, drum ‘n’ bass, 2-step garage, grime, dubstep and so on. This, among people seriously devoted to the study of such things, is known as the “hardcore continuum”.
Take the earliest rave music from the early 1990s, identified in its time as “hardcore”, and from that follows an extra-ordinary tale of musical expansion and mutation.
Rhythms shifted, tones and timbres changed, patterns arranged themselves only to be torn apart and reassembled. All of it happened over the course of just a few years then it ended. Or at least that’s what some observers have suggested of late, by way of fateful pronouncements about the seeming impossibility of truly big new musical movements now and increasing resistance to any meaningful cross-cultural sway. Others, taking a big-picture view, disagree.
Periods of quietude are just as significant as times of great rupture, they say; there is much to be learned from the old, earthy wisdom in the proverbial “calm before the storm”.
As conversations of the sort have progressed, Hyperdub has worked to proffer a state in which both diagnoses are true. The great flash of action has passed and yet it somehow also flashes on. There is reason to revel in the contradictions, and there are sounds to accompany them in their state of grace or disgrace, whichever might apply.
The Hyperdub tale begins with a Scottish man, Steve Goodman, who has come to be known much more under the mantle Kode9. At first, he was one of many smart and heady followers of electronic music, who started posting material to a Hyperdub website around the arrival of 2-step garage. The genre, minted with a bright, shiny and approachable sound in London around the turn of 2000, offered an intoxicating way into the hardcore continuum and all its refracted, but interrelated, storylines. And then, with the onset of so much shiny brightness, came an interest in the opposite: dark, moody, melancholy music with a pent-up sense of dread and a pronounced dystopian streak.
Somewhere in the intersecting circles of such extremes is the sound of Hyperdub as it now exists on a series of new 10th-anniversary releases. Each is a compilation with its own stated theme and each tells elements of a story still in the process of working itself out.
"I'm fascinated by rhythmic collectivity, whether it's pleasurable or not – just people moving together, differently, in time," Goodman said in an interview with The Wire magazine in 2009.
“I just think there’s something very fundamental or basic that comes before any political affiliation, ideological affiliation, almost underneath social categories, a basic model of what a collective is ... people coming together, joined by one thing, rhythm. The way I see it, rhythm is something that joins things together.”
It is a simple statement that is at once basic and profound. The notion that rhythm is an agent for connectivity or change requires a devotion to music that goes beyond idle creation and consumption. Indeed, it requires great faith in purpose, too. In the same interview, Goodman referred to the late German media theorist Friedrich Kittler (no raver, to be sure), and his suggestion that “our discos are preparing our youth for a retaliatory strike”. Here we have club culture as an active zone for physical and metaphysical training, dancing as an ongoing exercise in getting fit for whatever the future might yet have in store.
Goodman mentions the same quotation in his book, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. Focused on the subject of sound as a weapon throughout history, it is an academic tract that reads like an eccentric screed, shouting about whispered connections between World War II army battalions and newfangled ultrasonic insect alarms.
It is also as good an introduction as any to the Hyperdub world, which remains open and inviting to both cerebral partisans and those who might not be compelled to think about sound as more than mere material for entertainment.
To mark 10 years of Hyperdub, the label is releasing a series of compilations. The first special memento is a two-CD set, titled Hyperdub 10.1 [Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk], which offers a mix of new tracks and highlights from the catalogue during the past five years.
The focus goes to the label’s “dance floor dimension”, and the most suitable term for the occasion is “abstract”.
DVA's Mad Hatter starts off the 32-track ride with a woozy, whip-crack spell of stretching and lurching, and from there it shifts to a steady, methodical, rhythmic building-block structure by the young Detroit techno acolyte Kyle Hall. By the arrival of Mala's Expected, zoned-out and entirely hypnotising by just the third track in, a question arises: how did this all get so weird and otherworldly so fast?
The whole Hyperdub world has a way of sounding conventional, at least within the realm of experimental dance music, and then also radically stranger than just about anything else going.
The effect can be subtle and sly and, every so often, explosive, as it is in Spaceape by the gnomic artist Burial. Burial is the biggest act in the Hyperdub world by far, and yet his haunted, hallowed minimal dubstep sounds very much in line with the rest, even when it’s far apart.
“I definitely think Burial has had a big effect on aspects of popular music, in terms of people imitating him, but also being more open to stuff that’s dark, melancholy and, most importantly, overtly emotional,” Goodman told the website Pitchfork, earlier this year.
The emotional part of that goes to the theme of the second anniversary compilation, Hyperdub 10.2, which focuses on the label's liking for futuristic R&B. Beats still rumble, crack and creak but more prominent are slurred vocals and sound effects geared towards the heart and its many movable parts.
Burial himself figures in with the wistful Shell of Light. Other artists include Ikonika, Cooly G, Dean Blunt & Inga Copeland and Jessy Lanza.
The third in the series is Hyperdub 10.3, which focuses on ambient music from various releases in the past. This would ostensibly be the lightest entry, with weightless ambience the order for the occasion but its effects can be heavy and devastating. Kode9 & The Spaceape's Hole in the Sky is all sadness and dashed hopes but somehow life-affirmingly so, and Laurel Halo's Melt sounds like plaintive theme music to a despairing movie from a forgotten age. That it all works so well, and so resonantly in connection with the rest of the label's wares, upholds Hyperdub's contention that club music need not suit any one kind of manner or mood.
In the same retrospective interview with Pitchfork, Goodman, in a rare bit of self-celebration, said, “I’d hope we’ve opened the landscape a bit and made it easier for certain connections between that may not have linked otherwise.”
They did, and those connections are still busy finding new and enlightening ways to link up all the more.
Andy Battaglia is a regular contributor to The Review.
