"God damn dubstep."
That about sums up how I’ve felt about this British style for a while now. It caused me spasms; teasing me with its possibilities, but forcing a landfill of trash through my headphones. Maybe it was just ‘cuz I’m in here in New York, not London.
Well, now the DubWar heads are pounding the concrete streets of NYC, and I finally got a real taste of the style with the party they threw last night.
I didn’t really know what I was getting into, but from some of the mixes I heard on their website, I suspected it might be what’s up.
See, I’ve heard dubstep mixes where I had to suffer through twenty minutes of monotony before I heard a decent dub. Whole sets where I didn’t hear one minute of melody or complexity. I couldn’t even tell whether or not I was listening to different songs because they were all so similar as to be identical. It’s almost as if a lot of the heads in the scene are more concerned with identifying with a genre then they are with making good music - like so many of the purists in the prolific variety of electronic sub-genres.
But it’s a style that appeals to me with its forward looking attitude, as my man Blackdown is fond of saying, who was present last night. Dubstep caught my interest since I first heard some random snippets of its bomb-raid-like bass and rusty metal electronicness. I’ve been eagerly waiting to find examples of the style that pushed beyond the excessive loopyness and simplicity to attain the title of "music," and DubWar brought that shit.
I’m not sure who I heard - whether it was the Bomb Squad, (the production team behind Public Enemy who performed live last night), Loefah, Dusk & Blackdown, or any number of the resident DJ crew. But I do know that I most definitely came away feelin’ like the music I heard was worth the scraps of cash left in my hole strewn pockets.
DubWar definitely filled the emptiness my fiendin’ for good dubstep caused, but it took more than that to get my sleep deprived ass outta bed and into last night’s freezing wind. It was also the chance to hear this ish on a good system. I wanted the bass to rumble everything around me like the subway. And dudes did their best to provide.
Unfortunately, the police showed up and made them turn it down.
Killed the whole night.
In fact, the whole club - called Love, of all things - was hurtin’. The place was underground, and after you entered, you descended a flight of stairs that looked like a five year old’s idea of hell, what with its black light toy graffiti, grimy corners and all. They had this lounge that was pretty fly, with two open stories of loft spaces that held beds inside little caves. But the whole area was damp from this waterfall that took up a big part of the room. I couldn’t help but think about how bad the mold looked once you turned the lights on. Besides the water, you couldn’t really hear the music in there either. The only speakers were on the dance floor, and there were none in any of the other rooms.
Six dollars for a Red Bull with no alcohol? Riiiiight.
If this night is going to blow up, they’ll have to find a new spot. But keep your eyes on the DubWar cypher, ‘cuz they just might bring the fifteenth British Invasion.
While the IHeartComix crew may be most renowned for their high quality electro disco house, this month they posted one of the best recent heavy bass mixes around on their blog. Curated by Kanji Kinetic for No Love Lost Records‘ mixtape project, this joint is well worth dealing with a zSHARE file download. It’s one hour of pure dance goodness.
The prolific DJ Ayres and Cosmo Baker flip some of that for us with this 12″. It’s got 
