Martyn
Great Lengths
"No matter which pieces of vinyl you buy, what equipment you play them on or how much you crank up the bass, the true low-end experience can never be appreciated except over a proper club sound system. It pulses through your body, prickles the skin, presses upon your face, confounds sensations of distance and depth. The feeling of bass is a crucial component of virtually all contemporary dance music."
While Walmsley's description of the origins of dubstep in The Wire Primers leaves one with a hunger for dubstep, but it also walks one right up to a difficult question: if Walmsley's right, and dubstep is a style of music that requires a "proper club sound system" to truly experience, then what is it we're getting at home? If this entire genre is so tied into the low-end experience, can the genre survive the individual curation of musical culture, the world of self-determined mixtapes and 500 gigs of choice? Artists like Burial, Kode9, Digital Mystikz, the artists that inspired Martyn's transition from drum 'n bass to dubstep--they can sound great on headphones, but it's a sound removed, a sound moved away from the experience that bore it forth.
That problem, in itself, doesn't seemed to have concerned Martyn. Fashioning a dubstep album with the same level of audience concern that he used as a successful club dj, he's brought in all the bells and whistles of two decades of electronic music. Tracks that start off with a standard Benga riddim give way to weirdly danceable club music; atmospheric exercises (ala Burial) arrive as breathing room, depart as drum 'n bass style beats. That's not to say that Great Lengths is any less of a low-end experience, but that Martyn uses it to build a frame, then inserts the crowdpleasing bits for excitement. But the success of Great Lengths, the way in which its more easily digestible sound found purchase with those who found previous dubstep classics too sterile, has brought about a icy response from a few loyalists--"it isn't pure", for the one. It's an understandable attitude--Burial's sound may require investment, but it's far from sterile--but its an attitude that denies Martyn's obvious charm: he's making music that extends beyond the arenas that most dubstep works best in, either the club or the pricey headphones.
There's a moment at the beginning of Great Lengths where Martyn unexpectedly changes things up in a fashion worthy of exaggerated hyperbole: it's the moment when a computer voice drawls out the numbers 3-0-2-4. That moment, when Martyn chooses to name-check his own label, Death Row Records style--that's the demarcation point for the whole fucking genre. It's the moment when dubstep stopped relying on Spaceape for the personality, the moment when a dubstep artist quit zeroing in on the perfection of moment and mood, when one of these ghostly figures pranced about a bit without losing the mystique and vagaries of a music style trying to make its way out of the club without losing a bit of its club feel. Martyn's skill wasn't that he created something as uniquely personal as what dubstep had done before, but that he took what it had done best--the core worship of a sea of low-end atmosphere--and used it as a foundation to re-create what electronic music is supposed to be in the first place: the music of contemporary momentum. More than anything else, what Great Lengths captured wasn't the sound of a genre dying, but the sound of a genre finishing its research into what drum n' bass and house had left to atrophy. In Burial, dubstep found its perfection. Under Martyn, it began it's re-emersion into the general experience it had abandoned. From here, it said.
Where it begins.
-Tucker Stone, 2010
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