The 8 best Dub Techno tracks of all time

Dub Techno

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.

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1. 01

   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.

2. 02

   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.

3. 03

   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. 04

   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. 05

   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. 06

   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. 07

   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. 08

   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.