Both analog and digital developments have intensified the viral nature of sonic culture.

The acceleration and saturation leads to things becoming outmoded, or out of fashion before they've even happened. That's a pretty complicated situation. Hype becomes autonomous from its object and runs away with itself.

Basically, there were three aspects of dub that influenced dubstep. The most important was playing the instrumental versions of vocal garage tracks, which was a little like what dub was to reggae - the instrumental of a full vocal.The second was dub as a methodology, which, for me, is apparent in all dance music: manipulating sound to create impossible sonic spaces using reverb, echo and such. The third is the influence of the genre called dub. (It became a cliché actually, through sampling old Jamaican films and soundtracks, and adding vocal samples.)

I wrote a short article called "Yardcore" for that issue, too, as an attempt to talk about the Jamaican influence on garage, grime and dubstep; as a splicing of soundsystem culture and hardcore.

When a country is at war or in economic depression, underdevelopment or tightened security, it sets an affective tone or mood, which seeps through into everyday life via all kinds of channels.

The sound needed a hub to grow, and that hub was Big Apple.

Hyperdub started in 2001 as a web magazine, but we also did a few events in the early days before becoming a label.