Isolating the virus : the nexx level // nu wave breakbeat science-fiction-mutation
something different ahead // Wednesday diversion, LDN bridge thru the wasteland and accidentally/fittingly almost toward St Albans (home of Source Direct!)
All week my coffee drenched mind has been circling to the breakbeat/techno sounds of the files ((but wishing I was at home battering the speakers with the 12"s)) of CUB - C U 1 + C U 2 + Carrier - Neither Curve Nor Edge + In Spectra + T++ - Allied + Worn Down. The serpentine coiled breakbeat mutations of these six sort of techno but also dubstep and a 1 or 2 step into some drum & bass 12"s have set fire to my mind and distracted me with a pure energetic buzz of excitement that has made me very nearly end up in St Albans (home of Source Direct!) 4 times so far this week. What joins these properly sparkling records is how they fuse the DNA of breakbeat garage and urban decay concrete crumbling jungle with the coldest ever cold petrol sheen techno that is both futuristic - Carrier tunes literally came out just the other week, expertly tooled up in what came before, T++ stopped making tunes shortly after these 12"s came out like 15 years back and like Goldie, timeless - CUB took 8 years to roll another two 12"s (both proper and well worth your time!).
Distilling downward this nexx level new wave of breakbeat science-fiction alien sounding mutation is well mapped out if like me you are a nerd and spend to much time thinking about and follow techno and other similar styles of electronic music via The Wire, Boomkat, Hard Wax etc. I know you don’t need me to remind you but I’ve a long way to work while typing this sentence so off we go. Lets start at the joining of forces that was one of the sickest artists of the dubstep-era, think killer tunes on Loefah's legendary Swamp81, the captain of Osiris Music and all round bassline chopping don mega Monic with our long-time hero Regis for various Downwards records mixing and mastering and producing, and most enjoyably the last two CUB 12"s and various remixes. While T++ has been a key pillar of the Hard Wax shop who were instra:mental in breaking dubstep into the techno scene and his semi-regular Boomkat EOY chart is always peppered with the coolest/coldest breakbeat drum & bass tunes around (massive shout out to another Berlin institution and absolute hero the don mega behind Sneaker Social Club who from his Berlin base is consistently driving the hardcore sound also with mind blowing club night line ups and 12"s up to this very day and any future road(block) we traverse ahead - recent events include Christoph de Babalon, Appleblim and Demdike Stare to Slimzee & Jon E Cash and coming up Scion & Tikiman, Shackleton & Appleblim - beyond incredible). Into Carrier who's making the most vital electronics in memory and leading the charge for this nexx level // nu wave breakbeat science-fiction-mutation with his output to date, while utterly essential catalogue captivating records range from the very best in industrial strength paint stripping noise/techno crossovers for Hospital Productions, Blackest Ever Black, Hidden Hawaii and loadsa proper corking remixes for labels including Minimal Wave, also to mention his previous label Avian and countless sick as drum & bass 12"s for Metalheadz as half of Commix way back when (all of it is nae on indispensable). So as am sure you’d agree it shouldn't really come as any surprise that these three uniquely incandescent producers are the ones who’s records predict (T++), sparked the initial slower-crunchy dub/buzz (CUB) and in 2024 are more than anyone pushing/carrying things FWD (Carrier).
When placed beside each other (I made a playlist of the files and set to shuffle and each morning and night this week have sat and looked around at the desperate mad faces of the suited figures sat around me on the train endlessly going to and from work and thought I wonder how many of these people are dissecting the razor's edge breakbeat/techno sounds of these dopest of recent years CUB + Carrier + T++ 12"s, I imagine the majority, its amazing we don't all discuss it each morning and evening) these tunes merge into a never ending rubiks cube of shattered breakbeats, dubstep drenched echos, sharp edged techno, and the icing on the cake that also really excites me is the subtle science fiction atmospheres of these records in finest UR to Warp AI tradition. The artists alien aliases call to mind the sort of words that fall out of the sellotaped together yet still crumbling paperback pulp science fiction novels I often read on this journey to and from my corporate dream, Carrier of the virus, T++ the periodic table elements that make the molecule code for an antidote plus (plus - be warned am gonna be typing this a lot on the tracks ahead) CUB the earliest mutations of the sound. The spiky injection of the CUB track titles C U 1 / C U 2 / (UST Remix) offer straight codes and no solutions, yet the sharp edged roll sounds like most shocking system shutting down techno/drum & bass since classic No-U Turn-era techstep (also I’m sure you are saying to yourself, why hasn’t he mentioned the time when Regis who produced these two CUB records put out a head banging mixtape of this kinda demon exorcising gear under the titled Post Crucifixion, he’s mad to not mention this! well I just did as you were thinking it… lol). While Carrier sparks the initial spread of this recent years cyberpunk (basically 2019-2021) future-facing techno 'verse I am currently building in my mind with track tiles like 'Locus', 'Into The Habit' and 'Coastal' that are equal parts 'I Am Legend' the Richard Matheson post-apocalyptic horror novel (not the film) and The Changes that came out in 1975, a gritty depiction of a desolate near-apocalyptic world. The as best described by Boomkat (who were also the ones who made the connection with the T++ 12"s and inspired me to listen to these beside each other) 'smoked-out halfstep' sounds of these two hand-stamped under the radar shark-eyed and utterly killer Carrier 12"s (the TTTape and FELT 12" are essential also) are full of the modern-day dread of drifting through the chaos and the endless pressure of just trying to get by (it was one of those days yesterday, as I near work I've no doubt it will be another today) but it's distilled through a crystl of something otherworldly that predicts the past and for me really drives the sounds of his previous project and all time personal fav scene setting seminal album Under A Single Banner if it's apocalyptic jungle imagery on the record sleeve was a snapshot of the 95 to 98 pre-millenium tension of the essential Carrier recent mixtape, its urban decay mirroring the current collapsing UK I see out the train window twice'a and everyday "it was raining and that always made Battersea bleaker".
As the best Blackest Ever Black mixtapes taught us and told us “music is all about time travel, and that you can move both ways at the same time” I've also got the Thameslink techno train downwards on the CUB and Carrier tracks and reached further back into the record racks of time to the unlike anything other than themselves T++ trax that foreshadow both these CUB and Carrier plates with one step in the Croydon sound and one step in the sort of Autechre 'IDM' if we can/still/probably should as it really is call it that, track titles like 'Allied' ring true to the seminal Skull Disco dubstep allstars Shackleton & Applieblim who T++ allied with on remixes of Death Is Not Final and Vasan this same year with duppy pulse scattershots raining down hard with a waterlogged snare thats smokey crack(ly) sound could be an El-B/Ghost dubplate fallen down the back of the DJ both in Plastic People in the early 00s and forgotten to grow Mordant Music MMould from a spilled can of Red Stripe (I mean this description in the most very best way imaginable, 'Allied' is one of the greatest tracks ever made in either dubstep or techno, its deep as someone on a submarine eating a subway sandwich with fish in and thinking about basslines being played through subs in a subway station) chilly, eerie and built into a real time breakbeat that pulverizes and reduces all that gets in its way on the record shelves, DJ sets or record racks, and in finest Basic Channel tradition you can imagine it has been playing forever, a never ending constantly evolving and feeding into itself in an interlinked chain reaction that when you listen you are only hearing a small short sharp shock of it’s never ending plus (plus) always evolving excellence that will never fail to blow my mind. 'Tensile' on the flip ups the ante with a 3D to the point of being truly psychedelic Burial crackle + (+) a squashed breakbeat bounce that again honestly sounds like nowt else, closest thing right now I can think of would be say a swarm of angry mutant killer microbes swarming towards you in a drowned world Ballardian nightmare nightklub in some far off dystopian future. Sort of like a proto-Estrange by Shed, the breakbeat classic from his classic Shedding The Past classic (an album worthy of its own week plus (plus) of train ride typing and tuning in) that peppered my mind + (+) that classic Sandwell District RA mix (also worthy of its own week of psychogeographic speak, memory rail road wandering and spinning). The 'Worn Down' 12" perfectly captures what T++ was doing to dubstep and jungle, where dubstep was often referenced in the early daze as the 'ghost' of jungle, stripped back minimal, the urban paranoia of the still to this day dangerous concrete Croydon dystopia, 'Worn Down' does exactly what it says on the tin and wears down and rides the groove of every shuffling 2 step experiment with what constitutes a truly broken breakbeat. Flip for the 100 bar bite, I'm not sure what a bar is in music but some early grime was called 8 bar I believe (answers on a postcard) so I dream that 100 bar is exactly that, 10 times plus what 8 bar was in the sort of darkside of the underpass sound of classic grim-grime and submerged-sublow, hugely built to love and (like Love) be forever changing and truly sounding like nowt else in all honesty (I know I type that a lot!). Which before I become to techno myself and are repetitious to the point of going on in a loop about the same thing in a loop of going on endlessly I best make a move as am near work and this train doesn’t loop on endlessly which brings me to the conclusion of this top of my head ramble on what myself and undoubtedly no one else will be tagging as 'the nexx level // nu wave breakbeat science-fiction-mutation' if this gives you a buzz of interest and if you are reading this and not turned away in confusion/boredom (budum, budum) than make sure you instantly contact your local record dealer (well discogs left face it) and seek out pronto the vaccine that is these life-affirming and heavier than the day ahead 12"s from CUB + Carrier + T++ as nothing else will be able to both save me or you from the work day ahead, yet these tunes when I leave and get on the underground and back to the Thameslink techno train, will no doubt in my mind be the nexx level antidote for the brutal virus of the work day just gone.
Score the tunes here »
Carrier
https://boomkat.com/products/neither-curve-nor-edge
https://boomkat.com/products/in-spectra
T++
https://boomkat.com/products/allied-tensile
https://boomkat.com/products/worn-down-100-bar
CUB
https://boomkat.com/products/cuc65e8d008578fb083eb108a9c27189fac4623238
https://boomkat.com/products/cub-e959a86b-333f-41db-9712-5713339ef764