Big up Bare

The twostep/grime explosion of a few years back seems to have run its road, overtaken by dubstep as the languorous rhythms and caverns of reverb of dub infiltrates the jerky twostep, dropping deep sonic bass notes in its path. A music at once raw and expansive. The DJs on the 'pirate style' Dark FM, Sub FM and the veteran pirate Rinse FM play sets that start up slow lazy, morphing into livelier, nervier beats. But there is a foreboding, a darkness, a melancholy, to the music with its minor key shifts with sampled dislocated voices rising through swathes of echo as though out of some deep ketamine hole. It is simultaneously disassociative and brooding, thrilling and uneasy, constantly on the edge of trouble.

At Bare Files you can find mp3s of the best of the latest pirate sets, the barest dubstep.

The word surrounding the Burial album’s imminent release (read an interview with Burial and some mp3 previews on Blackdown) is that it will become the record of the moment, if not the year. Dubstep is set to go overground, and on this sunny weekend, with long term reports that this could be the longest warmest UK summer since 1976, it sounds like becoming the inner city soundtrack of the season as pavements around the Borough melt, the humidity rises, a steamy fug settles and the city slows into an uneasy and frazzled hallucinatory dub daze.

Keep it locked.