eMusic Guide to Hyperdub Records
Hyperdub is a label that came very gradually into being. Existing first as a blog, then purely as an outlet for Kode 9's fearsome reductions of dubstep and grime to their barest essentials, its output was sparse until the emergence of mystery producer Burial propelled it into the wider public eye. Since then it has grown exponentially, taking on a motley crew of artists orbiting — but never quite exactly part of — the U.K. underground sounds of the 2000s: dubstep, grime and funky. Just six years into its existence, it has now developed one of the clearest and most instantly recognisable aesthetics of any modern label, the cubist geometries and colours of its artwork perfectly reflecting the new refractions of electronic dance music that whirl out of the speakers when the tracks play. United only by love of enveloping bass and a sense of sonic exploration, the Hyperdub family feel like a rag-tag gang of space explorers launching out into the unknown, and throwing the occasional excellent party as they go.
Sonic Pioneer
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Kode 9, aka Steve Goodman, is not so much in charge of Hyperdub, as entangled into its very structures. He's said in interviews that the label runs him and not vice versa, and certainly his artistic identity and that of the label often seem completely inseparable. From the throb of "Sine" almost nothing more than a bass pulse and Spaceape's warped reworking of Prince lyrics to the kaleidoscopic complexity of recent tracks... like "Black Sun," his music has elaborated its themes and become more colourful as the label diversified and blossomed. And in the midst of all this is Memories of the Future, an album of sinister robotic dub poetry and layered electro grooves locked together like a Chinese puzzle box, sci-fi film noir atmospheres and elegant but shadowy geometric games that seem to rearrange themselves into new forms each time you delve into it.
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21st Century Blues
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A sadness runs through much of Hyperdub's output a combination of urban loneliness, nostalgia for the lost fire and unity of the rave years, and a politically-charged sense of a world in chaos. Burial's albums have been the most celebrated encapsulation of this, and Darkstar's tapping into a particularly northern English melancholia has been making waves lately. But it's King Midas Sound's album which perhaps best captures the various kinds... of high-tech bruised romanticism represented by Hyperdub: the none-heavier production of Kevin Martin's The Bug project sublimated into post-human dreamscapes, vast in scale in contrast to the fragile and all-too-human voices of Roger Robinson and Hitomi which gently, tentatively try to express emotion in a desolate world.
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Robots Got The Funk
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Around 2008, just as Hyperdub's association with dubstep was beginning to seem like a millstone around its neck, the sound of "U.K. funky" burst onto London's pirate radio stations, and provided a flood of new creativity which the label eagerly tapped into. Twisting grime and dancehall into the structures of house music, U.K. funky provided a new kind of party sound that was upbeat without being facile, culturally rich without sinking into... undifferentiated "fusion." Ill Blu, Cooly G and Kode 9 himself have all turned in glorious demonstrations of this style's flexibility, but its Hyperdub stalwarts L.V. who made 2010's barmiest anthem in "Boomslang," bringing out the implicit African influences in the style with the repetitious vocals of maverick South African MC Okamlumkoolkat, the irresistible syncopations of the rhythm track and "boomslang" chant punctuated with cries of "SNAKE!" Its flipside "Zharp" is more disjointed, with wiggly-worm funk synths creating a deeply bizarre digital-tribal groove. Two hilarious, disquieting and profoundly peculiar dance tracks and a paragons of 21st-century underground cross-fertilisation.
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Mutants & Mavericks
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By virtue of never having adhered to any one template completely, Hyperdub is the ideal home for the most individualist of electronic artists. The video game bleeps and unorthodox melodic angles of Ikonika and Quarta 330, the loony-tunes funk-grime-rave of Joker and Zomby, and the spaced-out sensualism of Cooly G's less conventional tracks fit them all into this bracket and Terror Danjah's 2010 album puts him right... out there among this crew of ever-innovating misfits. A lynchpin of the grime scene, but always aloof from its rivalries and aggression, Terror Danjah deals in high-energy electronic future-funk with a wicked glint in its eye that tramples boundaries and confounds expectations at every single turn. From sunny, Daft Punk-y vocoder disco to dark musings on psychological troubles, from glossy electrohouse to gutter-level grime, from optimistic pop choruses to demented electronic wig-outs, it shows an artist and a label determined to channel the best that subculture and geography have to offer, but to never be tied down by those things.
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