Because we live in a condition of ubiquitous music and media, and near infinite technological memory, it is much easier for local cultures to find an audience that resonates with their music, whether local or globally.
Dubstep didn't invent bass, it just zoned in on it. Bass, to varying depths, is the foundation to most dance musics.
The acceleration and saturation leads to things becoming outmoded, or out of fashion before they've even happened. That's a pretty complicated situation. Hype becomes autonomous from its object and runs away with itself.
Technical devices or processes which receive intensified investment during cold or hot wars spread through societies contagiously once their monopoly by the state has been undermined.
When a country is at war or in economic depression, underdevelopment or tightened security, it sets an affective tone or mood, which seeps through into everyday life via all kinds of channels.
Audio virology is not a metaphor. It is to be taken literally. It maps real processes of mutation, transmission, contagion and memory within music culture.
Hyperdub started in 2001 as a web magazine, but we also did a few events in the early days before becoming a label.
Basically, there were three aspects of dub that influenced dubstep. The most important was playing the instrumental versions of vocal garage tracks, which was a little like what dub was to reggae - the instrumental of a full vocal.The second was dub as a methodology, which, for me, is apparent in all dance music: manipulating sound to create impossible sonic spaces using reverb, echo and such. The third is the influence of the genre called dub. (It became a cliché actually, through sampling old Jamaican films and soundtracks, and adding vocal samples.)
Both analog and digital developments have intensified the viral nature of sonic culture.
Most music culture these days runs on systems and networks devised to deal with the aftermath of thermonuclear war. Music culture has a habit of using these moods and machines in creative, unintended ways.
There is an uninformed myth circulating just now that makes dubstep way too important in the musical universe - don't believe the hype.
A one-word book does appeal to me.
The sound needed a hub to grow, and that hub was Big Apple.
I wrote a short article called "Yardcore" for that issue, too, as an attempt to talk about the Jamaican influence on garage, grime and dubstep; as a splicing of soundsystem culture and hardcore.
