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Selected by The Waxonia Desk

The Waxonia Desk on Dubstep

Five records from the January 2006 broadcast usually credited with taking dubstep national, and from the months either side of it. A few hundred people in a Brixton basement were given two hours of national radio.

Autoplay · All 5 play here · plays through and starts again

  1. Digital Mystikz / Anti-War Dub

    2006 · DMZ

    Mala's case for space over impact, made on national radio. The restraint was the hardest part of the argument to get across at the time, and it is the part of it that lasted.

  2. Skream / Midnight Request Line

    2005 · Tempa

    The tune that converted people who had no idea what they were listening to. A scene needs one record everybody can hum before anything else it does is allowed to travel.

  3. Kode9 & The Spaceape / Sine of the Dub

    2004 · Hyperdub

    A Prince cover reduced to a sine wave and a recitation, broadcast to a national audience. Nothing about that was a safe choice, and it is why the show is remembered as an argument rather than a playlist.

  4. Burial / Archangel

    2007 · Hyperdub

    From just after the broadcast, and the record that took the sound to people who would never go to DMZ. What a scene gains in reach it loses in the room, and this is the trade being made.

  5. Benga & Coki / Night

    2008 · Tempa

    The other direction entirely — a bassline built to break a room. Everything people came to love and to hate about the next five years of dubstep is already audible in it.