Up to this point, the masked producer SBTRKT has made his name primarily by remixing bigger-ticket artists, including M.I.A., Basement Jaxx, Mark Ronson, and Underworld. (He's made a few lateral moves too, working with Modeselektor and Fantastic Mr. Fox.) Part of SBTRKT's appeal must be his apparent flexibility: On his own productions, he has a crisp, driving sound that, like a lot of contemporary UK dance music, feels steeped in sub-styles that evolved in different directions (like two-step, funky, and dubstep) but have sloshed together over the past few years. Basically, he's a contempo-generalist, someone I'd guess is hired as much for his professionalism and sonic cleanliness as his artistic cache. Even his mask-- an all-purpose "tribal" piece fringed with what looks like dried grass-- is a well-meaning symbol: It's to say that "who he is" isn't as important as what he's doing. Of course, "who he is" is a question that has two meanings: One is the way that the IRS and DMV mean it, the other is the way that we mean it when we talk about what makes an artist stand out in the crowd.
In 2010 he released a handful of singles and EPs, several of them split or shared, several of them on reliably interesting labels, including Brainmath and Ramp. One of his last releases, Step in Shadows, came out on Young Turks, a label responsible for the xx, El Guincho, and Holy Fuck (an indication that even indie folks are hearing him as a kind of all-purpose ambassador from the world of Rill Dance Music).
My main concern about it-- or question, if you want to couch it that way-- has to do with the exact geographic or sonic location of SBTRKT himself. Over four tracks, he moves through styles so effortlessly that the running thread-- whether on the level of composition or sound itself-- is practically invisible. Rigid electro, thumb piano, warm atmospheric synth pads, Chicago-style house, the wobbly bass (which is to dubstep what distorted guitar is to hard rock)-- they're all here, but blended in ways that somehow sound both seamless and completely unintrusive. The moods are all nocturnal and a little sneaky, but that's like saying the mood of a cake is sweet-- it's more rule than distinguishing feature.
Untold, another London-based producer, covers a similar amount of stylistic ground (running all over house, dubstep, and funky), but has such an idiosyncratic way of sculpting and blending the sounds themselves that his tracks are easy to pick out-- they're stamped. The difference is between risking a smaller audience because you're headstrong about your style or risking an audience that isn't that invested in you because they're not sure who you are.
One of the paradoxes here is that there's nothing that sounds even remotely bad on Step in Shadows. It's a glossy and well-assembled 18 minutes of contemporary UK dance music. But it doesn't really command my attention, and it never sticks its neck out-- which seems like an all right way to play your remixes but a confusing way to treat your own music.
