- New Zealand's Epoch appeared almost a decade after the birth of dubstep. His tracks echo the later responses to the style, which tend to emphasise its rhythms, sub weight and spacious arrangements over its innovative spirit. But he's part of a subgroup of producers—among them Gantz and Commodo—who've found creative elbow room in this more restricted space. Last year's Badminded LP turned the high production values and menacing moods of deep, latter-day dubstep to diverse and absorbing ends.
"Listen This," also for Blacklist, is even more striking. It features the Bristol MC Rider Shafique, who caused a ripple last year with the Young Echo-produced "I-Dentity," a blistering deconstruction of modern day racism and "the colonial mindset." Epoch's production requires something simpler on "Listen This," which opens with distant klaxons and a guy talking about "getting into riot gear." Shafique's voice, crammed into the track's claustrophobic, delay-strobed spaces, is often unintelligible, but the lines—"Kings don't bow, don't plead, don't beg / I've come to take heads"—that pop out send a clear message. The beat lurks around 100 BPM, its spindly halftime swept forward on an unstoppable magma flow of bass. On the B-side, "Dust (Artillery Mix)," Shafique is replaced by sharp fusillades of sampled voices. The drums are similarly skilful, this time in dubstep's 140-BPM zone. The acres of space between dulled claps and monotone bass stabs are filled with deft detail: hi-hats convulsing in triplet-time, minor-key melodies swaying like seaweed in the deep.
TracklistA Epoch & Rider Shafique - Listen This
B Epoch - Dust (Artillery Mix)