Matt - “I had the pleasure of watching my good friend Joe (Littlefoot) play an all-dubstep set in a cave (!) in Nottingham recently, and I've basically been listening to nothing else since. This latest mix is a collection of some of those tracks I've had repeat (and, I'd wager, almost entirely tunes that Joe introduced me to at some point).
"Dubstep" became a bit of a dirty word for a while after it went stratospheric and everyone started making shit EDM and Brostep, but it still has a special place in my heart (the good old stuff at least, and the handful of folks who've taken that sound forward). Listening to some of the pioneers of the genre opened up my mind to a whole new way of listening to music, which paved the way for me to discover and enjoy a lot of music I'd not been able to get my head around before. Some of these records came out nearly 20 years ago, and still sound just as cutting-edge and forward-thinking today as they did on their initial release.
DMZ's mantra was always "meditate at the bass weight", which pretty much sets the tone for the collection of tracks here - heavy, skeletal, mind-expanding music that has an almost spiritual quality to it, heightened by the chest-rattling low-end. Pretty much all of these tunes are ones I have on LP, apart from the (very good) new Sicaria, which I believe is digitally only (although please holla at me if there's a 12" version I missed, because I'll be buying that if so...). It's perfect music for wandering around the city in cold weather - all icy synths, concrete reverberations and neon. Some of the best music ever made, period.
NOTE: some purists will argue that a few of these tracks aren't "technically dubstep", which is true, but it's all spiritually dubstep-aligned, so fuck it. It's a broad church”.