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Dub Techno

The 8 Best Dub Techno Tracks of All Time

Detroit techno played through a Kingston mixing desk in a Berlin basement. From 1993 a handful of producers reduced the music to a chord stab, a delay and an enormous amount of tape hiss, and found that almost nothing was enough.

Origin
Berlin, Germany, 1993
Tempo
120–130 BPM
Also known as
basic channel sound, berlin dub, chain reaction
Tracks
8
Updated
2026-08-29

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  1. Number 1: Basic Channel / Phylyps Trak

    1993 · Basic Channel

    A single chord, a filter and eleven minutes. Moritz von Oswald and Mark Ernestus establish that a techno record can consist almost entirely of the space around its own decay.

    Also on The Waxonia Desk — The Hundred

  2. Number 2: Basic Channel / Quadrant Dub

    1994 · Basic Channel

    The purest statement of the method — the rhythm dissolves into delay returns and never quite reassembles. Thirty years on it still sounds like it was mastered underwater on purpose.

    Also on 1994, The Waxonia Desk — The Hundred

  3. Number 3: Maurizio / M-4.5

    1994 · Maurizio

    The same people, the warmer alias, and the closest this music comes to a dancefloor tool. Restraint used as a groove rather than as a refusal.

  4. Number 4: Porter Ricks / Port of Call

    1996 · Chain Reaction

    Hydraulic, corroded and genuinely oceanic. Thomas Köner brought a sound artist's ear to the format and produced its most physically unsettling record.

  5. Number 5: Vainqueur / Lyot

    1993 · Chain Reaction

    Nine minutes of one chord breathing. The record that demonstrated the style could be handed to somebody else and survive intact, which is what turned a studio into a school.

  6. Number 6: Monolake / Cyan

    1997 · Chain Reaction

    Robert Henke and Gerhard Behles making the label's most precise record, while writing the software that became Ableton Live. The tools and the music came out of the same room.

  7. Number 7: Rhythm & Sound featuring Sugar Minott / Never Tell You

    2001 · Burial Mix

    The circle closes: the Berliners hire actual Jamaican vocalists and cut the results to dubplate. Not a techno record with reggae on it — a reggae record made by techno producers.

  8. Number 8: Pole / Raum

    1998 · Kiff SM

    Stefan Betke built a career on the crackle of a broken Waldorf filter. Dub technique applied to a fault, and the most convincing case that the noise was always the subject.