Reptile Dub Mixoriginally aired december 2006 on resonance 104.4 fm, london uk
recorded live in boston at beat research
summer of 2004, hot as hell. we were searching for a sound. scouring the earth for it. bass, complexity and space, but not too fast. swing beats, soul and funk and grit, but dark. breaks, slow, but intricate. varied. this HAS to exist. what’s it called? two-step and garage was a cool feel but too cheesy. we wanted darkness, doom and space. a few vague genre names floating about but nothing concrete yet, nothing congealed. no rules. i.e. the fun time! digital music delivery was in its infancy still. no soundcloud. not much on youtube, very few blogs. time to hit the pavement.
“dark garage with no vocals” i clumsily blurted out at more than a few london record shops, the ones where they keep the records tantalizingly untouchable behind the counter and the sales staff choose things for you based on the vague mumblings of socially inept fledgling dj types who are just seeing the light out of their studio caves for the first time in months. and the overly bouncy sales staff didn’t have the foggiest idea of a genre name either, but they had a hunch what i was looking for, and set me up at a listening station with a mammoth stack of records, some of which were close to it! yes! here it is!! this one is close. yes YES YESSSS conjuring the manic sweat of kerouac’s dean moriarty, and my own little stack emerged in the “keep” pile.
the seeds of that day’s score later became this mix. the genre became what we all know as dubstep, it spread into every corner of the world like digital wildfire, and mutated into hundreds upon thousands of variations and ideas, the academic differences of which will be forever debated in the hallowed halls of the internet... but to me, this is the magic sound of that summer, of possibility, and vinyl, and of the hunt.