Hybrid Juxta Posers

Bristol’s Swarms mix post-rock/shoegaze with post-dubstep, making common cause with the juxta-posing likes of Clubroot and Mount Kimbie. Meanwhile Berlin’s Dadub site themselves at the inbetween of Ostgut Ton/Berghain techno and Raster-Noton ambient-tinged minimal tech a la Kangding Ray. It’s part of the exponential genre hybridization characterizing contemporary electronica, but this is where quality control identifies one or two blends that are more than simply fiddly-dee and modish, and actually provide for listening pleasure.

Swarms’ Old Raves End (Lodubs) is not all comfy listening, with a tad too much Burial-beloved helium-diva vox manipulation early on, but as it proceeds, there’s much to enjoy in its melding of postrock/shoegaze chops with dubstep and d’n’b. The remarkably unlovely suburb of Stokes Croft must have been the site of something distinctly blissful for the lads, commemorated as it is with this beauty:

Stokes Croft by Swarms

More gauzey texture and low flow follow:

Time Lapse by Swarms

Sterling by Swarms

Bison by Swarms

Meanwhile, in Berlin, Italian techies Dadub patch the recursive pulse'n'atmo of that zone’s techno’s kick-thrum into the ambient dub motherlode in surely the most vibrant recent example of what's become an increasingly moribund by-numbers sub-genre, with their ambient-dub-techno transmission, Monad VIII on well worth watching Stroboscopic Artefacts (see esp. Lucy).

Hadean // Monad VIII [Stroboscopic Artefacts] by Dadub

Ilya // Monad VIII [Stroboscopic Artefacts] by Dadub

Amnion // Monad VIII [Stroboscopic Artefacts] by Dadub

Biopoiesis // Monad VIII [Stroboscopic Artefacts] by Dadub

“Dadub built Monad VIII upon the concept of systems. It’s an EP where molecules, hyper-structures, sonic cells shuffle together to form a subaqueous dub landscape. This is a vision of creation as a fluid, self-organizing structure. It soundtracks the earth submerged underwater in ‘Hadean’ and charts the cradled development of human life with ‘Amnion’. The crux of Monad VIII is ‘Ilya’ an odyssey dedicated to Ilya Prigogine, whose research into dissipative structures and complex systems won him a Nobel prize and inspired Dadub to explore the limits of the Monad to an almost quantum level. Dadub have created an experiment into the creative process which has produced four systematically ecstatic results.”

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