These dudes are on some star-dense shit. Broadly, the songs below are Dubstep. They’re all built on those deep and fat wah-wah noises I love so much, which give each track its own anxiety-driven cadence. I often feel like the world is about to shatter and cascade down around me when I listen to this shit, which is rewarding because my life is still intact when the songs end, and in this way I can manufacture relief.

My understanding is that this stuff is not bass-weight-meditative in the way that really brainy Dubstep can be, but is instead made to be listened to aggressively and angrily, with drugs in your body and a headbutt-thickened skull if you’re a particularly hard sort of person (which I am not, but my limbic system knows what’s up).

Anyway here are the tracks. I hope they stress you the fuck out.

Caspa & Rusko – Bread Get Bun

Download audio file (Caspa and Rusko - Bread Get Bun)

I think this sounds like the crisis of a football firm, fighting for fun.

I first heard these dudes on their Fabriclive 37 mix, which was mostly tracks by them, plus some hard-nosed hits from 2007 by Coki, D1, Distance, etc. It seems that serious fans of this stuff actually dislike the direction C&R are taking with this and their other recently released tracks. They think it’s fucking up Dubstep and ruining their lives but really they’re just being precious dicks. This genre is young! Let it mutate and diverge!

DZ – Down

Download audio file (DZ - Down)

This is a track that is set to alienate from the start. It strips you of any melodic expectations you brought along, punches you in the face, and then drops you into a motherfucking SPACE JAIL full of subwoofers and broken pianos and the smell of engines.

When I was a kid I used to have a recurring dream every time I slept in front of this stone fireplace at my grandparents’ house. In this dream, I was small and grey and trapped in a huge windowless room, dwarfed by giant red and blue pistons that fired regularly, stamping from ceiling to floor, while faceless red and blue men patrolled the place. The pistons were powered by a steaming, organic energy — something familiar and dirty, like coal or oil — which made their threat more comprehensible and inevitable. It was the kind of dream that hollows you until you’re bottomed out, and it used to frighten me so completely that I would let the pistons crush me to death everytime I had it, knowing that dying in my dream would wake me up.

Something in “Down” helps me compartmentalize and own that sense of helplessness. It makes me feel powerful and determined and in control.

DZ is from Vancouver, which is pretty tight. I don’t know what the scene is like there but it’s a long way from the dirt of England where Dubstep is growing so violently. I ripped this from the end of the Jokers of the Scene NLLR mix that came out last year (which is excellent), so it includes an extra sample at the beginning, but I kind of like it that way.

Oh and:

The Count & Sinden – Stinging Nettle

Download audio file (the count and sinden - stinging nettle)

I posted this one elsewhere a while ago, and these guys aren’t really known for making thick tracks like this lately, but I still feel like “Stinging Nettle” is an incredibly heavy monster. This song is more alarming than the others: it uses the wah-wah as a siren, and builds quickly towards a faster stepping, more dance-compelling beat. I sort of can’t believe these guys also made “Beeper”.