HYPERDUB - Hyperdub 10.3

First the feast, then the hangover, and now the trip back home after the binge, complete with all the headache-induced ghosts that come with it. Steve Goodman really thought this one through, this birthday party for his Hyperdub unfolding in stages. A tribute on every front, thoroughly deserved yet calculated down to the last detail, much like the trajectories his career – both as a musician and as a label boss – has followed over the years. And it goes without saying that this third stage of a marketing-textbook celebration couldn't help but be marked by the misfortune that seems to have struck the name in question over the past few months, which, following the tragic (and predictable, for anyone who knew his lifestyle) death of Dj Rashad, led to the far more unexpected and devastating passing of none other than Spaceape. The right-hand man, the voice of Kode9. The companion of a thousand adventures, the "other" face of Hyperdub.

We'll remember this third chapter of the "10" saga, besides being the "saddest", without a doubt as the most fragmented. Twenty-three tracks, only nine of which run past two and a half minutes, a handful of artists coming from all over, some not even directly tied to the Hyperdub brand but included purely to contribute to the overall design with their own signature, style and palette. If "10.2" a month or so ago showed us pop according to Hyperdub, here we're faced with experimentation according to Hyperdub. And, as a result, with an obvious bow to the artist many consider its flagship act. Kode9 leaves it to Burial to blow out the third round of candles, and it's no accident that even the press release, describing the angle of the catalogue framed in this compilation, literally reads "the melancholy vapour trail mapped out by Burial's numerous atmospheric beatless moments". This time, he's the one steering the ship.

So he opens, and how could it be otherwise. Him, the alien who pushed dubstep to surpass itself by rediscovering its garage roots on a parallel planet. Him, who never showed his face before the rumours that cast him as Four Tet's alter ego, rumours he put to rest with a half-hearted selfie just to stop the chatter. Here he opens with two minutes of pure ambient music, "In McDonalds", straight out of "Untrue", "the alien's alien album", and you immediately understand that this morning's first light is not the usual kind. Kode9 arrives right after alongside the late Spaceape, with one of his most celebrated tracks, "Hole In The Sky", which ended up in an advert and instantly became a cult favourite; in between there's Dean Blunt, with one of his jazzy, expressionist sketches, titled "Urban" and taken from the latest (so far) of his cross-disciplinary performances. Then it's the turn, unsurprisingly, of his partner-in-crime Inga Copeland, who toys with synths and noise on "I Am Your Ambient Wife".

Being left stunned is a real risk here, because this truly is alien music. Four tracks without a single trace of humanity, not a whisper to bring you back to real life, just one single keyword that, on the second seal bearing Kode9's name (the Badalamenti-esque "Pink Sham Pain Down The Drain"), grows even stronger: abstraction. Anyone who knows Hyperdub and its artists well had already had the chance to experience this dark side, almost always kept in check and doled out sparingly by each artist in isolated, often purely incidental episodes. But finding it all here, in a single monolith, has an effect truly comparable to the disorienting feeling of a post-binge comedown. Because a Laurel Halo toying with factory noises only happens on "Melt", and the asphalt-born enfant prodige Walton arrives at the cosmos of "City Of God" by wandering along a very specific path, namely the unfolding of that "Beyond" from which the track itself is drawn.

The tracklist is arranged in a sort of programmed chaos, with breathing-room moments deliberately clustered around the middle of the record: take the patch of clear sky amid the darkness offered by King Midas Sound and their "Blue", the vicious circle of "DSM" courtesy of Lee Gamble (remarkably present with one of his more "normal" tracks), or the five minutes of ascension staged by The Bug on his "Siren". Burial reappears in this stretch too, this time with the far more "human" "Night Bus" from his self-titled debut, and here we move into drones in their purest state. All this before two more female voices, Ikonika and Cooly G, surprise us with two tracks completely outside their usual territory: the swift, slippery "Completion V.3" for the former, and the soft, romantic ballad "Mind" for the latter.

Darkstar's "Ostkruez" is charming without being revelatory, but only because we'd already come to know their ambient side well on "News From Nowhere": had we been left with just "North", from which it stands out as the exception to the rule, it would have been a different story.

In the final third into which the compilation can hypothetically be divided, the "three graces" reappear even more astonishing than before: Ikonika conducting an exceptional synth orchestra on "Time/Speed", Cooly G falling back into her more recent pop leanings on "Trying", and Laurel Halo detonating voices and keyboards on "Wow".

The new protégée Fatima Al Qadiri, left out of both of the first two releases, brings her thoroughly Oriental taste to "Shanxi", an instrumental decidedly more interesting than the assorted trash mix of "Asiatisch". The ever-present Dva slips in his cunning touch, indulging in all sorts of effects on the impalpable "Reach The Devil", while Fhloston Paradigm puts himself forward as the first of the two exceptions to the tracks' short running times: his "Lilloo's Seduction" is a dub odyssey that stretches out for ten minutes, in a kind of middle ground between Burnt Friedman and certain recent electronic experiments by Nils Frahm.

We've reached the end of the parade, and the feeling this time is of having just finished listening to the soundtrack of some hypothetical TV series cloned from "Twin Peaks", with all the virtues and flaws that implies. The impression is further heightened by the explosive finale credited to Jeremy Greenspan, the second exception given the seven-minute length of his "Gage", during which the veteran joins forces with Canadian Borys to distort and pile up drones in a style reminiscent of Ben Frost. The intended goal is achieved once again, and boldly so: "Hyperdub 10.3" fills the booze-soaked journey home with ghosts and visions (and the dreams of the hypothetical "night" still to come). But a series of doubts can't help but arise, for the first time, in anyone who admired the first two instalments of this extended celebration: was it really necessary to gather a batch of minor fragments (however fascinating and often splendid, in many cases they're still mere divertissements, or simple interludes between the standout tracks) by artists who, with this dark side crafted around Burial's sound, actually have precious little to do with it?

The answer is subjective, and everyone will arrive at their own while listening. But a good compilation surely can't just be a collection of tracks pulled haphazardly from their original context and lumped together under a common denominator that's anything but solid. And, in that sense, the comparison with the two previous instalments doesn't hold up in the slightest.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

27/10/2014