The innovations of Berlin’s Basic Channel in the mid-’90s led to a whole new way of thinking about dance music, introducing countless producers to the possibilities of reverb and delay. Producers have been working off the template they set for dub techno ever since. Less often imitated is the duo’s work as Rhythm & Sound, where they slowed their music to reggae tempos and hewed closer to the Jamaican innovations that informed their trippy production tricks. This sound is having a small moment right now. Stuttgart’s Ghost Dubs has made a career of it, both solo and with a fired-up Kevin Richard Martin; Brussels’ Carrier shaped it into cavernous forms on last year’s awesome Rhythm Immortal; all the while, co-originator and close Rhythm & Sound collaborator Paul St. Hilaire has been putting out some of his best music ever.
Give U Space, New York producer Kenzo Perron’s full-length debut as K Wata, is one of the strongest takes on the sound since it was perfected on the run of singles that became Rhythm & Sound’s oceanic 2001 debut. It doesn’t aim for extremes of blown-out bass like Strategy’s latter-day dub-techno landmark Graffiti in Space, nor is it as incorporeal as the rainy phantasms St. Hilaire made with Vainqueur. Instead, it relies on a precision uncommon in this often scrappy and experimental genre. Every aspect of every tail of dub delay feels deliberate: how long it’s allowed to last, how loud the feedback is allowed to echo. Careful calibration comes to mind, rather than the mad-scientist experiments typically associated with dub. You can visualize each bass thud bumping up within a hair’s breadth of the red zone, enough to rattle your car but not incur permanent woofer damage.
These eight tracks feel like experiments in how much detail one can put into dub techno without breaking the pall of austerity inherent to the music. Vocalist and designer SG appears on two tracks, mumbling lunar transmissions that Perron could easily have lifted from an old science documentary; that he has a collaborator on call as a human sample source speaks to the extra level of burnish that makes Give U Space special. Certain sounds function as landmarks after a while: a friendly octave pling on “Looking Glass,” a killer Reese bass that makes brief but satisfying appearances on the 13-minute colossus “There Will Be Love.” It’d be a stretch to call the music catchy, but you might be left with certain loops and phrases running through your head, struggling to recall whether they came from this record or something older, like Pole or Vladislav Delay.
Perron’s early EPs bear plenty of influence from dub techno but also feel musically aligned with the post-dubstep moment of about 15 years ago, when producers like Pearson Sound were making music so spare and syncopated it was as if they were playing pockets of air like drums. “Whisper Dub” represents that side of Perron’s sound on Give U Space, and it’s an impressive genre fusion that makes you wonder why post-dubstep didn’t take more from dub techno, given how much they have in common. But it’s an outlier, throwing the album’s rhythm off; so is the following track, “Radio Embrace,” whose serrated drone and irregular kick drums bring to mind Boards of Canada’s Tomorrow’s Harvest before they’re drowned in a sea of squishy dub effects.
Those two tracks occupy a jarringly different sonic space than the three-song slabs that sandwich them, but they also display a forward-thinking streak, a sense that Perron has thought about where you can go with dub techno rather than hewing to the reliable gray-on-gray palette in which even some of the genre’s best exponents were content to paint. The more you listen, the more shades reveal themselves in this initially monochrome landscape, as if your eyes are slowly training themselves to see in the dark. Give U Space has been out for less than a month, but I already feel like it’ll be talked about in the dub-techno conversation for a long time—or at least as long as its insinuating little pops and squeaks stick around in people’s heads.
