Here is some music for listening to in a dark room lit by a computer monitor at exactly 2 AM on August 8, 2003.
"Plugman" is an electronic-music performing artist actively operating in Japan, but his YouTube account is used exclusively for short sound tests and module demonstrations; I've been watching the account for months waiting for him to post an actual song. Here he finally has, sort of, a short but extremely sick 2-minute jam with cool swooshy synths. This makes me think of whatever it was "dub" meant in the early 00s techno scene.
- "Taxi", Pole
In 1996, a DJ named Stefan Betke dropped his Waldorf "4-Pole" filter and broke it. The "broken" filter turned out to make strange, unique crackly noises that Betke loved so much he recorded 3 entire albums of minimalist, borderline-ambient "dub" techno based around the filter's new sounds. This is my favorite track from the set, a tense, hypnotic descent into a single hissing loop disrupted by sketchy reggae instrumentation.
"Dub" emerged in the early 70s as a minimal, bass-focused, echo-drenched variant of reggae.
Then "Dub" emerged in the late 90s as a techno genre aping dub reggae style, generally with no lyrics and often with minimal, microhouse, or (sometimes) no beats.
This YouTube dub techno set was made on Korg's quartet of cheap desktop synths, and it's good. Actually, it's very good. Cocooned in floaty vibes
- "Wallfacer", Vladislav Delay
Vladislav Delay has been making distinctive, often cryptic glitch-adjacent electronic music since the late 90s, and is considered one of the foundational artists of dub techno. He's now releasing lots of rapid-fire EPs on a Bandcamp-mediated subscription plan. This is from this year and feels dub-like in spirit (if not in stereotypical elements), beats and isolated abstract noises floating in dark space. A zen rock garden made of sounds.
- "Starlight", Model 500 (Moritz remix)
This week's list wound up with a dub techno theme, so I thought to cap it off I should listen to some dub techno classics and pick a really epic track to post on Friday. What I then realized is that dub techno doesn't really do "epic". "Satisfying" or "chill" is more its speed. So here's a seminal dub track from 1995 that is just really intensely satisfying, a tiny understated funk groove. A splash of cool water on your face in July.
⬇️ Click below for more dub from YouTube and the list I got "Starlight" from ⬇️
- "Illusory Walls", Cobra Truth
This YouTuber makes some traditional-standards dub techno with some interesting modern equipment: The Make Noise trio of noisy synths, a 303 clone, and the Digitakt drum machine (probably driving the Make Noise). Okay, so 2/3 modern. This takes a minute to get going but then it jams pretty hard, really nice bright and clean production. PS: No, the MS-20 visible in the background isn't actually used in the track.
- "Killed By A Feedback", Dynamo
This is another track from that "best dub techno tracks of all time" list I mentioned. It's from 1996, and it's weird: The parts of a techno song as if heard muffled through water, gradually building steam. There's a point where it flips over from confusing and abstract to extremely danceable and both sides of that flip are fun, in their way.