All dub techno sounds the same, yes, but only some of it is good. It’s a curious scene; its origins and heydey alike were practically the exclusive domain of two dudes, Mark Ernestus and Moritz von Oswald. Across several aliases (Maurizio, Rhythm & Sound, and most centrally Basic Channel) they both invented and spearheaded the exploration of the genre, perhaps the purest representation of the utterly wild frontier available to electronic musicians in the 90’s.

Not that the sound is without roots, of course. Dub techno is perhaps the best example of the ongoing phenomenon of white electronic musicians reinventing the wheel, where the wheel is a fully mature and tradition-steeped genre of music pioneered by black artists decades prior. Here’s a Rhythm & Sound track from 2002, and here’s an Augustus Pablo dub from 25 years prior - it’s your call whether being the added explicit about influences and inspirations is any more noble than wholly unacknowledged whitewashing a la festival trap music.

In any event, the music’s amazing. It’s a totally pure form, rhythm plus texture, that at least partially explains why so many of the genre’s luminaries were duos, each specializing in one half of the equation. As a result, it functioned as a sort of genre connector, dulling the less-accessible edges of either components’ unadulterated expression: not sold on the virtue of sonic textures in the form of 45-minute synthesizer drones? Try it again with the world’s most intuitive rhythm underneath. Similarly, it broke new ground in terms of electronic music that one might actually listen to away from the dance floor - having neither the inclination nor the connections to find warehouse parties to rave at, I still find large swathes of the world of club-oriented dance music difficult to get into without experiencing the environment that they were made for. It’s no coincidence that electronic music’s two most introvert-friendly forms - dub techno and dubstep (or at least the UK conception thereof) - share Caribbean music as a common ancestor.

That development wound up being really important, because most dub techno fans are fuckin’ nerds. One of my favorite things is discovering that the big British producer of a given moment is a capital-B Bloke, and I was delighted to see that the aforementioned Mark Ernestus, co-father of the genre, has a viable fallback career as Voldemort. That’s a really harsh and fucked-up observation to make, yes, but it brings me to a larger point - dub techno is practically science fiction’s musical equivalent in terms of world-building. Like everything else going on in electronic music at the time, it was the dawn of a new era that allowed any sufficiently dedicated producer to create the exact sounds that they wanted, from scratch. As such, producers could express themselves with an unprecedented amount of precision - where emoting through music had previously been limited to a given instrument’s musical tradition or physical acoustic capabilities, there were no longer structural limitations to reaching perfect sonic expression. This led to the use of music to illustrate whole mythologies that had been playing out in people’s heads, feeding right back into the genre’s powerful ability to transport the listener to a completely different realm (given how all this stuff eventually gets washed out by nostalgic, highly-derivative callbacks, a decent barometer of quality is to see if a track's title is closer to Darthouven Fish Men or some tripe like Sadness).

On that note, I want to talk briefly about something that’s not strictly related but won’t ever get an essay of its own: Drexciya. Largely anonymous, vaguely black-nationalistic, and entirely unique, they a full decade before the death of co-founder James Stinson building out an entire underwater world through Detroit techno instrumentals and lengthy liner notes outlining the mythologies, mores, and meanings of the Drexciyan state. It was done about as unpretentiously as it could be given the scope, and the music is completely effective at, if not communicating a singular image of the place, taking you to your own personal Drexciya. Like most artists of the era, their discography is split among many incredibly expensive 12 singles, but Clone Records recently issued a helpful four-part compilation of early tracks called Journey of the Deep Sea Dweller, which I highly recommend checking out.

Anyway, this has already gotten quite long without ever touching on what’s happened in the last fifteen years or so. Dub techno is (mostly) over now because it was a moment, a sort of race - not to any finish, but simply forwards - between relatively few individuals who had arrived at the same sonic terrain. The natural tendency of the era was to listen, respond, and advance: once sonic possibilities swelled suddenly to infinity, no one was interested in sticking around to dwell on what had just been invented. As such, electronic music’s tendency for incredibly narrow and precise genre definitions means that dub techno as its founders knew it either ended quite quickly or dramatically expanded its scope, depending on your insistence on pedantic adherence to the true definition of an art form. I suppose that I lean towards the former camp, simply out of concern for the descriptive function of genre - however, if you’re interested in more modern expressions then be sure to look into folks like DeepChord, TM404, and Andy Stott, all of whom I was going to include in an attached compilation before I ended up having to stay super late at work, where I still am and will be for some time (sorry, should've been more on top of this - if you want the actual files, hit me up tomorrow).

Instead, The Hip Replacement's Guide to Dub Techno:

01. Basic Channel, Quadrant Dub (Edit)
02. Maurizio, Domina (Edit)
03. Rhythm & Sound, Aerial
04. Rhythm & Sound, Never Tell You (ft. Paul St. Hilaire)
05. Fluxion, Fovea Centralis
06. Brendon Moeller, Merry Go Round
07. DeepChord, Vantage Isle (Spacecho Dub II - Extended Mix)
08. Pub, Summer
09. TM404 - 303/303/303/606/606
10. Andy Stott, Luxury Problems