When Bristol legend Pinch released the out-of-nowhere "Croydon House" in 2010-- on the London-based Swamp81 instead of his own foundational Tectonic imprint-- it felt like a sea change. One of dubstep's most influential pioneers, one of its diehard careerists, had made his own version of a house record (and this was before 2011 when it became the norm). In keeping with his usual heads-down dubstep, however, "Croydon House" was murky, dim-lit, and paranoid, not your standard garage-influenced thumper, and his tracks since have seen him navigate a no man's land of in-between tempos and experimental rhythms, culminating in the bewildering Pinch and Shackleton collaborative album at the end of last year. It goes beyond just productions: This summer, Pinch started incorporating house into his DJ sets, dedicating sections of his timeslots to the 4/4 stuff. Was he moving on from dubstep?
It's this many-limbed and flailing, vaguely house, vaguely techno hinterland that Rob Ellis' long-overdue entry in the Fabriclive mix series occupies: The drums still swing and shake with that tribal energy that marks his best dubstep work, but there's not always the snare on the third, and sometimes there's a four-to-the-floor kick. The mix begins mid-track and cleverly continues the conceptual current that's been running through commercial mix CDs as of late: think Four Tet's own Fabriclive go for a similar example of artiness run amok in a dance mix. The nervily pulsating throb of Atlanta producer Distal's "Venom" both opens and closes the set, sealing it into a closed circle that, at least in its peripheries, raises questions about the linearity of mixes in the first place. There's an obvious left-to-right motion here, but there's no grand closer, pensive opener, or any real climax: Left to its own devices, Pinch's mix never really ends, the same bumpy journey over and over again, bubbling and bubbling but refusing to boil over. Does it need to end for it to be a satisfying product? According to Pinch, apparently not.
This little tweak allows Ellis to play around with the sequencing, and Fabriclive 61 begins with a gallop, running through a surprisingly techno-tinged opening stretch, with French producer F's overlooked (and hugely inventive) "Slow Down" colliding with Shed's latest in his rave-techno EQD alias: it's an almost confrontational greeting from someone once associated with the purest of dubstep, and a true sign of the times for both the genre and one of its most prominent heroes. The mix continues in this vein before fading out into beatless-near silence with Roly Porter's gorgeous mechano-classical "Hessra"-- at which point Pinch's remix of Photek's "Acid Reign" storms out, bringing the mix into more familiar 140-bpm dubstep territory.
Where some recent dubstep mixes like Youngsta's Rinse CD or Distance's Dubstep Allstars Vol. 8 were fine showcases of the genre's steadfast traditionalist communities, they were nevertheless tainted by the genre's turn inward (or the formulaic). Pinch's selection of pounding kicks, crash-landing snares, and LFO growls, however, sound both more vital and crucially more alien(ating) than ever. His choice of producers is impeccable, mixing in old stalwarts who are at career highs (Distance's sound is as mean as its ever been, and Goth-Trad's lost in some LSD rabbithole) and producers like Roska and Addison Groove who provide strange, unconventional takes on the median dubstep tempo. It's the most exciting 30 minutes of relatively pure "dubstep" since Appleblim's career-defining Dubstep Allstars Vol. 6, taking that staggered "dungeon sound" and infusing it with all the psychological paranoia and jagged, jigsaw-puzzle rhythms that defined his own best work, both dubstep and otherwise.
So how do we get from dubstep back to whatever Distal's "Venom" is supposed to be? Ellis one-ups the "Hessra" play, dropping the loping limp of Illum Sphere's "Promise a Secret"-- a tightknit blend of hyper-compressed string samples that's eventually gutted by Distal's more assertive track-- on top of Om Unit's jerky "Pressure". Which brings us right back to where we started, traversing the most current iterations of the bass music continuum as viewed through Pinch's dusty, obsidian lens.
What makes the halving between tempos less jarring is Pinch's distinct aesthetic: the music here is damaged, blackened, and always foreboding, no matter what tempo it's pounding at or what genre it might be interrogating. That unrelenting blackness can be suffocating, and it's definitely unfriendly, but it's never boring-- which is a lot more than you can say about most "dubstep" mixes these days. So while Pinch might not have moved on from dubstep completely, he's definitely moved somewhere, and it sounds like an exciting place to be.
