Crack

Over the past 12 months, Cardiff’s club promoters have collectively – and finally – embraced the surging wave of producers and DJs that washed over the world of dance music after dubstep went and kicked down all the flood defences with its big, bassy jackboots.

The cream of the new breed – James Blake, Sbtrkt & Joy Orbison – have all graced the city over the past year. But for all the fresh new faces that have confounded expectations and whipped up a whirlpool of overlapping genres, a visit by the dubstep architect and Hyperdub label boss Kode 9 is still a major event in the calendar.

Or rather, it should have been. There was an almost embarrassing turnout for the man who introduced the world to Burial, Zomby, Darkstar and the trademark baritone boom of Spaceape. But for the few who made the pilgrimage to the Hyperdub shrine, the reward was a blistering set of bass music.

Support came from Egyptrixx, an act with a nice line in laser-sharp synths and a string of tasty releases on the ever-reliable Night Slugs label. Despite being billed as a ‘live’ show, it was one man and his laptop. Does playing your own material on your own computer in a different order than it appears on your album really count as live? That is one of the great philosophical questions of our time, so I won’t try to answer it – but it is odd that playing ‘live’ on a laptop is often so much more dead than the apparently un-live act of DJing other people’s music…

In any case, the show was all about Kode 9, who managed to shift gears between whip-crack dubstep, crisp, punchy, two-step infused house and rattling jungle. That might not seem impressive in the age of anything-goes electronic music, where the only people who still play one genre of music when they DJ are over 40. But this wasn’t a cut 'n' paste job – it was one long, smooth stream of beats, straight from the belly of the beast. Rumbling up and down the bpm ladder, sometimes funky, sometimes tough, the Kode 9 sound still seems somehow future-facing after all this time at the helm of the good ship Hyperdub.

Kode 9 last played Wales in 2004, when no-one could have predicted the plate-shifting impact dubstep would have. Surveying the beautiful mess that dubstep has made, Kode 9 must feel like a man who opened Pandora’s box, in the best possible way. Most of Cardiff missed a rare set from an elusive man who has spent a decade pushing the parameters of dub-influenced dance music. Kode 9 in the (empty) house…



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Words: Adam Corner

http://www.myspace.com/kode9

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