The Top 30 Albums of 2009: # 28

Silkie
City Limits, Vol. 1

Simply run down the list of 2009’s break-out dubstep artists, and you come up with a pretty clear picture of how quickly the genre is accelerating and fracturing. Zomby closed out last year by releasing Where Were U in ’92?, which welded old-school rave music to Burial’s dystopian, RZA-warped soul. Then, a 20-year kid from Bristol named Joker positioned himself as the dubstep’s corollary to grime’s Dizzee Rascal by dropping a couple of monumental singles in “Digidesign” and “Purple City,” which were so laced with deep funk that bloggers scrambled to come up with silly new genre names to accommodate them. Finally, producer Peter O’Grady rocketed into notoriety—thanks in part to an enthusiastic mention in one of Martin Clark’s Pitchfork columns—with dubstep’s best moniker, Joy Orbison, and one of its most exciting singles, “Hyph Mngo.” Joy Orbison’s house-inflected sound stands the likeliest chance of pushing dubstep closer to the mainstream, a move backed by scene veteran Skream’s remix of UK synthpop stars La Roux’s “In For the Kill.” Dubstep may have been born out of several relatively static sub-genres—drum n’ bass, UK garage and grime—but 2009 proved that the nascent form could shoulder growth in a billion directions, making it one the most versatile musical movements in recent memory.

Amidst all this expansion of sound, Silkie’s City Limits, Vol. 1 charges boldly in the opposite direction—inward. It’s as if Silkie set out to create a vision of dubstep that’s somehow dubsteppier in its essence than his predecessors’. The genre’s barest requirements—2-step’s syncopated rhythm, a gut-scraping bass pulse, deceptively brisk tempos that sound like they’re running at half-time—constitute 75% of the London producer’s palate. Silkie is infatuated with rhythm the way someone like minimal techno godfather Richie Hawtin is—except that dubstep’s rhythms are thornier and more intricate than techno’s. When Silkie allows one of his beats to carry a track, it’s like a nesting doll, continually opening to reveal tinier and tinier microcosms of sound. Frequently, he counter-balances his drum machine clacks with brief synth stabs, and, on the album’s best moments, the rhythms give way completely to instrumentation with real live blood in it. In one masterful run on “Head Butt Da Deck,“ for example, one of Silkie’s most forceful and straightforward rhythms drops away to make room for a handful of cascading piano trails, which themselves provide the foundation for a planetarium-worthy synth progression. When the drum machine finally comes crashing back in, the synthesis of the three sounds—one organic, one synthetic, one percussive—hints at the wealth of possibility bound within Silkie’s talent. If City Limits, Vol. 1 is what he sounds like mastering the basics, just wait until he starts experimenting.

-Martin Brown, 2009

Comments

[sean witzke]

Fuck I'm firing up bittorrent now man, I need to hear all of this shit.

[NoahB]

That's a great review.

[NoahB]

...but firing up bittorrent would be *wrong.*

[Chris Jones]

On the one hand, I can already tell that much of the music on this list will not be my thing. On the other hand, I only bought two albums this year and they were "Crack the Skye" by Mastodon and "Manners" by Passion Pit, so I'm basically admitting I don't know bullshit about what happened in 2009 on the music front.

[Tucker Stone]

Ah, you'll like some of it.