Today is impossible. Yesterday was the same. I predict the same for tomorrow. My head is a bleak place, not in the way an atrocious Dickinson poem pretends to be but more like a silent space-scape: a vast void. Into that scape, then, not land but ether, comes this set from intelligent Dubstep pioneers Kode 9 and Space Ape.
Kode 9 and Space Ape: Live for Giles Peterson
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Performed and recorded live for Giles Peterson’s BBC show on the 24th of July this year, this bleeding-from-the-cut-at-the-edge-of-beyond set from the man who is Hyperdub Records (essentially, the home for that beating-heart, pumping-blood futuretech dubstep sound that’s gaining steam every day) is the soundtrack to manic moods and paranoia. With MC/future-poet Space Ape less “rapping” than discussing, presenting, dangling the unknown and the hopeless just in front of the bleak sonic architecture, the stuttering and stammering kicks and heavy low-end that Kode 9 layers underneatth him, this set sounds like the embodiment of futureparanoia. When Space Ape breathily intones on “the mechanics of stress…”leaving a pause, an emptiness that Kode 9 fills with some of the heaviest, most world-altering shit you’ve ever heard, all I’m able to gasp is “this is what I wish Radiohead sounded like”. And it is. Though people talk about Thom Yorke being the harbinger of the future, this stuff makes him sound achingly dated and, worse yet, feeble.
This is a 27 minute trip through bleakness and brilliance.
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