besides everything mentioned, i think uk funky was crucial for this transition. cause all of a sudden you could smoothly mix between dubstep and house. not to mention that garage was becoming cool again when hessle & co were starting out and that kinda set the scene a bit.
also guys like martyn who were mixing techno & house from the get go.
night slugs came a bit later on and their affiliations were more like trouble & bass, blog house etc.
as for mount kimbie imo that was more for guys who were coming from other types of music via hearing burial and fly lo.
A lot of the tracks mentioned I just thought were by dubstep artists. no idea darkstar, RSD, guido, joy orbison etc werenât âdubstep producersâ but I kinda see what you mean at a time around 2009-2011 there was so much inspiring stuff coming out of the dubstep scene that werenât necessarily formulaic wobbly/bassy dubstep but more âexperimentalâ in a sense although I hate the word. I was absolutely obsessed wit that darkstar track âlilyliverâ but the hyperdub single was really cool too.
I agree. the interesting thing about mount kimbie is that I read somewhere sometime that originally they were trying / thinking about making this sort of really aggressive tear out wobbly stuff but didnât have the sound design skills so they just expressed themselves and made something really different. glad they did! even their first EP has aged really really well IMO, imagine if they had made an ep full of heavy wobblers lol no-one would remember it brostep or not
yeah not that those dudes arenât just thinking in terms of people that have made a name for themselves outside dubstep but got involved at some point (posted that one ft guido cos of baobinga, guidoâs not been that active outside of 140, tho i think he used to be a grime dj in bristol before his tunes got interest)
I was at Bloc this year and bumped into a good writer/music journo friend of mine and we got chatting about this. And he wanted to know why I stopped releasing music. I said it was because it just didnât feel fun to build music for release and the label had had so many setbacks financially it was just a daily grind and expensive personally to keep it running.
He said he thought there was another factor which really led to the implosion of the dubstep scene in Bristol, in that when the big guys made their names, everyone went their own direction (some to Berlin, many elsewhere) but the community, that particular scene, just became quite disparate. And it really got me thinking, I was/am completely dependent on my friend circle for inspiration. And the community fed each other in that respect to. Weâd see each other at nights, weâd go round houses for radio shows etc etc. And whereas there was space for the c / d list players like me when the community was real tight, when that went away, we all struggled.
For instance I made the Punch Drunk release specifically for Pev, I remixed Erstwhile Riddim because I really thought I could do something different with it, if he didnât like it, no one would have heard it. And he came and said he wanted an a side for it, so I wrote something Punch Drunk and Pev compatible. Obviously it meant something to me as well (Boat Noodles was my hype track before going to Thailand later that month), but I wouldnât have written without support/inspiration from Pev.