- Plastic People, the club at which FWD> have hosted their weekly residency since 2001, doesn’t look like much from the outside. On a weekday, you’d be hard pressed to spot the broken sign above the doorway that sets the tiny basement club apart from surrounding Shoreditch. But even if you hadn’t heard of FWD>’s crucial role in the spawning of dubstep, it would have been clear something was up on the Friday the 18th, when massive queues formed in anticipation of Hyperdub’s Kode 9 and Dutchman Martyn.
There is a rumour that when Plastic People was being built, every penny was spent on the soundsystem, with just enough left over for a single blue light behind the DJ booth. It turns out not to be quite true: they also sprang for a modestly made but well stocked bar. On arrival, it was hard not to agree that this was one club that had its priorities straight. The menacing stacks of speakers proved themselves easily capable of providing the physical means for the FWD> crew to deliver on their promise of “basslines to make your chest cavity shudder”.
We were amongst the first in, finding Benny Ill spinning. Ill is tall, with long, lanky blond hair, and, as his name suggests, looks as unhealthy as could be asked from any DJ. As the place quickly filled, Ill played dub of the eclectic variety, exhibiting a fondness for tunes with off-kilter drums and mixing with astringency, showing disdain for smooth transitions but nevertheless bringing to bear a leftfield logic that began to make more sense as his set went on. The quality of selection and the fact that he made no pretense of providing easy fodder to get the crowd moving made it work, but by the time Kode 9 came on at midnight, it was hard not to relish the feeling of being about to disembark from our uneasy passage on Captain Ill’s ship onto terra firma.
Kode 9 wasted no time in dashing that hope. His set started with twenty-five minutes of outrageously wild dubstep, such as the Ikonika 12-inch out soon on Hyperdub. The feel was something like breakcore crossed with 8-bit, with the propulsive stream of steady sub-bass beneath hinting at a steady groove, but not providing one. Instead, noises were grouped together more by theme than by any conventional rules of music, the sort of thing where everything—including the beats—feels off beat. Somewhere close to halfway in, bass drops started arriving, things cohered and dubstep updates of everything under the sun began arriving in quick succession.
Hip-hop and drum and bass remixes and tunes culled from further afield were the name of the game in a set that probed the potential of dubstep’s musical structure: if artist albums from Kode 9 and Burial are notable for their musical richness in contrast to the sludge-step bass reductions of others in the scene, Kode 9 here took the same principle and pushed it to its very extreme, demonstrating just how many different genre elements can be squeezed into the dubstep format. The only rule that seemed inviolate was the never-ending fetishization of bass. Most intrepid clubbers have probably been lucky enough to have experienced a soundsystem that let them feel the push of bass-disturbed air against their skin, but in Plastic People Kode 9 raised the noise level sufficiently to set our noses vibrating.
By the time Kode 9 wrapped up his hour spinning, the floor seemed to have split into two distinct camps. Those who looked as though FWD> was a second home—and who mainly lurked in the pitch black shadows in the corners and behind the speakers—seemed highly tolerant of the indulgent styles exhibited thus far. The doe eyed newbies, which admittedly included your intrepid RA crew, had the look of those still enjoying themselves, but also mostly seemed fairly thoroughly lost. As luck would have it, Martyn provided respite for this second camp when he came on the decks, playing music a bit more firmly anchored in convention.
As fans of his know, Martyn put out a couple of 12-inches last year that pulled off the devilishly hard trick of sitting halfway between techno and dubstep. His set focused in the same way on mixing between genres, starting with quite a bit of UK garage before finding room for deservedly massive dubstep hits including Mala’s ‘Left Leg Out’ and Kode 9’s remix of Massive Music’s ‘Find My Way’. Martyn found time, as well, to even fold in his own ‘Broken’ before finishing with, of all things, Carl Craig’s ‘At Les’. Instead of focusing on the newest dubplates, Martyn rolled out a set consisting of stunning tunes that probed the same important question to the insular world of dubstep: how can dubstep best relate to other genres? Unlike Kode 9, however, Martyn used cross-genre mixing instead of genre-defying remixing to answer it.
As could be expected for someone biting into a new beat structure with almost every mix, Martyn’s set had its wobbly moments—a fate to be expected from a set that stuck primarily to smooth, linear transitions rather than the choppy, drop-intense ones more normally seen in dubstep. But it mattered little on a night that was so closely focused on innovation above all else. FWD> lived up to its name, dishing out a glut of experimentation and exploration that, at one or two moments, was too far out to be successful but which nevertheless showcased a huge amount of fabulous music in a way that made no room for anything but next level thinking.