There is an uninformed myth circulating just now that makes dubstep way too important in the musical universe - don't believe the hype.
Kode9I 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.
Kode9Hyperdub started in 2001 as a web magazine, but we also did a few events in the early days before becoming a label.
Kode9Dubstep didn't invent bass, it just zoned in on it. Bass, to varying depths, is the foundation to most dance musics.
Kode9Basically, 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 clichรฉ actually, through sampling old Jamaican films and soundtracks, and adding vocal samples.)
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