ARTICLES
2006 Top 10s and 20s
2006 Artist Picks

ALBUMS
17 Pictures
Angina P
Ateleia
Benni Hemm Hemm
The Boats
Cappablack
Celer
Dead Letters Dead Words
Deceptikon
Deerhunter
Denzel + Huhn
Displayaz
Dollboy
Drone
Eluvium
Emanuele Errante
The Eternals
Fear Falls Burning
Marcus Fjellström
Fonoda
Funkstörung
Goldfrapp
Gyroscope
Robert Henke
James Holden
The Idealist
Anders Ilar
Landing
LCD Soundsystem
Library Tapes
L Pierre
Lullatone
Tor Lundvall
Mad EP
Mahogany
Melodium
Mem1
Daisuke Miyatani
Mole Harness
Momus
Monoceros
Mormo
Mothboy
Original Hamster
Pierson & Horton
Prince Valium
Radical Face
Retail Sectors / Yaporigami
Rylander & Elggren
Scott Solter Plays PIM
Sideshow
Silicone Soul
Skream
Splinters
Mark Templeton
Thread Pulls
T. Raumschmiere
Tycho
Ultre
Virculum
Xela

COMPILATIONS/MIXES
AudioArt 03
Cumulous
Dubstep Allstars Vol. 4
Eriksen / Toft / Utarm
Katapult VA Vol. 3
Let's Lazertag Sometime
Mr Geoffrey & JD Franzke
Skagen / Halvorsen / Toft
Tectonic Plates

3"/7"/10"/12"/EPs
Gabriel Ananda
Robert Bardini
DAT Politics
Dead Letters / R. Sundin
Dogmixer
Benjamin Fehr
Fenin
HL
I Make This Sound
Zoë Irvine
Kyriakides and Moor
Lamont & 2tall
Ljud. & Piloten / Kama Aina
Jacob London
Sam Mcqueen
Miskate
Ryo Miyashita & Hiiragi_
[nara]
New Faces
Of / Greg Davis
Charlemagne Palestine
Phon.o vs Litwinenko
Portable
PostPrior
Samarah
Nicholas Sauser & Ditch
Someone Else
Hannes Teichmann
Tractile
Andy Vaz

IMAGES
F.S. Blumm

VA: Tectonic Plates
Tectonic

Tectonic Plates includes enough marauding bass wobble, lurching stop-start grooves, gunshot snares, and doomsday ambiance to keep your resident dubstep freak happy for at least a week or two. Listeners new to the genre could do a whole lot worse than start with this top-notch collection from the Bristol-based Tectonic: two discs, the first filled with thirteen choice selections from the label's vinyl-only catalogue and the second a fluid, twenty-track mix disc comprised of label highlights (eight reprised from disc one) and forthcoming material, and both of them filled with contributions from leading talents like Digital Mystikz, Loefah, Distance, Skream, and MRK1. Dubstep's dark side is well-represented by titles (i.e., “War Dub,” “Full Metal Jacket”), naturally, but also by the music: the lethal crush of Armour's “Iron Man,” the pulsating sub-bass warble in Headhunter's “The Haunted” and Vex'd's “Third Choice,” and the blade-sharpening snap of Omen's “Frontline.” Elsewhere, the main theme in Skream's “Bahl Fwd” sounds like a stoned riff on the sombre Dies Irae melody in the “Songe d'une nuit de sabbat” (“Dream of a Witches' Sabbath”) from the Fifth movement of Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique while Digital Mystikz's “Molten” sounds like some mutated dubstep re-creation of Kraftwerk's “Hall of Mirrors.”

If there was ever music tailor-made for the opium den, it's dubstep—and not merely because of the occasional sitar, tabla, Indian flute, and Eastern vocal chant that drifts aromatically through mesmerizing stunners like Distance's beautiful “Temptation.” It's also the hallucinatory vibe and slow-motion rhythms that imbue the music with that hypnotic, smoke-drenched atmosphere. And, no question, the music is hypnotic and remains so throughout the collection's two-hour-plus duration. A key reason for that is the artists' tendency to leave the music's oft-skeletal frame exposed—all the easier to savour splendid bass-and-drum configurations like Hijak's “Nightmarez” that reveal the genre's dub roots.

January 2007