The Global Bass Juggernaut

When dubstep — and adjacent genres — go worldwide

By Rick Anderson

In the world of electronic dance music, genres are in a constant state of proliferation, splintering, and disintegration: no sooner does a new variation emerge than it’s divided into subgenres before (sometimes almost instantly) disappearing from the scene. This is largely down to both the vastly increased ease of creation and the instantaneous global distribution made possible in recent years by the combination of cheap electronic composition tools and the Internet; the more quickly and widely people can be exposed to each other’s work, the faster they can react to it with variations of their own, and the changes then multiply both quickly and exponentially.

So it should come as no surprise that a genre that began to emerge in the London clubs in the late 1990s should be adapted and adopted across the world very quickly, finding its way into a wide variety of indigenous musical styles.

We’ll be talking about dubstep itself more in future issues, but for today I want to bring to your attention a series on the Swiss SUBBASS label. The series is titled Ethnostep, and its ninth volume just dropped a few weeks ago. Like previous installments, it features a wide variety of interpretations of both dubstep and its growing number of adjacent genres — hints of UK garage, techno, dub reggae, and trap are all discernible across tracks by the likes of Cardamohm (France), SPCZ (Germany), Kamarius (Romania), and Bangkok Riddim Syndicate (Thailand).

And best of all? All SUBBASS releases are available for download on a pay-what-you-want basis.

High quality beats at an unbeatable price — outstanding.

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