The thing DJ, producer, writer and academic Steve Goodman wants you to know about his record label is that it's not really a record label: it's a virus. "That's the way I understand music culture. There's a history of music, particularly dub and reggae, being described as a virus – Hyperdub is a mutation of British
electronic music, infected by Jamaican soundsystem culture: from dub and reggae, through jungle, right up to grime, dubstep and funky. It's a way of thinking about how musical change and evolution takes place."
The label that brought Burial to the world is now celebrating five years of these mutations with a double-CD compilation of new and classic material, called simply Hyperdub 5 – spanning the various genres mentioned above, as well as lots of gloriously twisted electronic music so new that it has yet to take a street name.
Originally from Glasgow, Goodman moved to London to be closer to the music he loved at the end of the 1990s, and started Hyperdub as a web magazine in 2001. "The main editorial remit was the Jamaican influence on London electronic music," he says. Under the name Kode9, Goodman has been making music since 1995, and turned Hyperdub into a label to put out his own Sine of the Dub in 2004, after prompting from Kevin Martin, aka the Bug. "I was interviewing him for XLR8R magazine and he said, 'You should release it yourself,'" Goodman says. There's never been any grand plan though: "The whole thing's been a series of accidents."
Without an A&R policy, an office, or even any employees, Hyperdub is a remarkably successful one-man empire, although that does have its drawbacks: he gets sent a lot of music. "It's just painful," he says, "I'm really drowning in it. Especially now I've broadened out the remit of the label, so it's not just one genre of stuff I'm being sent."
Key among the series of accidents that has seen Hyperdub championed from the NME to the New Yorker, presumably, was releasing Burial's music, and it becoming unexpectedly popular. "Yeah, that was completely unforeseen," he laughs. "I was worried about putting his album out – I didn't think anyone would be into it. It was quite a weird take on garage."
Goodman was "hugely relieved" when Elbow pipped Burial, who had been the bookies' favourite, to last year's Mercury Music Prize, so protective is he of Will Bevan, the man behind the music, who was desperate to avoid the full glare of the media spotlight. "There are certain tunes on there that are obviously not that sophisticated," Bevan told me self-deprecatingly in a Film & Music interview prior to the album's release, when he was still able to protect his identity. "I'm just pretty defensive about it, because I was never really expecting so many people to hear the record."
With Bevan clear that all he wanted was a quiet life, Gordon Smart, editor of the Sun's Bizarre gossip pages, started a campaign to unmask Burial last summer. That forced Bevan to reveal his identity – he was not, as Smart had suggested, Fatboy Slim working under an alias – and triggered a litany of revenge fantasies for Goodman. "I went through how each one of these scenarios would play out, and they all seemed to result in me imprisoned for the rest of my life – you know, 'Sun Journalist Kneecapped' – it's not a good look," he sighs. "So it was just me quietly, in the privacy of my own home, cathartically burning a copy of the Sun. That was as close to voodoo as I could get on a Wednesday afternoon."
A more positive effect of Burial's success was that it meant Goodman could plough the money Hyperdub made off the album back into the label – into releasing more regular vinyl releases, into compiling Hyperdub 5, into imminent albums by the likes of Darkstar and Ikonika, who grew up on dubstep and garage, but are now taking it into bold, bright new directions. It's a mutation Goodman has been eager to incubate.
'It's like hearing circuitry cry'
By about 2007 I was getting left a little cold by the greyness of dubstep: stuff that is literally just drum and bass, with no tone colour. That minimalism felt fresh at the time, but that freshness doesn't last, it leads to stagnation, and gets predictable." So the virus mutates? "Yeah, your immunity to it increases. And like any drug experience, your response becomes, 'I don't get high off that anymore.'"
The new Hyperdub sound is all about synthesisers: sci-fi melodies as the host for this restlessly progressive London dance aesthetic. "It's like hearing circuitry crying," Goodman has said of this recent output, and for new signings Darkstar this idea of computer love is a real fascination. The duo talk with gusto about studying film post-production, about 2001: A Space Odyssey, John Carpenter, and the "robot dialogues" on their forthcoming album. Their new single Aidy's Girl Is a Computer is one of the stand-out tracks on Hyperdub 5, and the pair tried to use a particularly robotic vocal on it: "When we were making it we did actually spend a lot of time trying to get our Mac to sing to us … but it started to get a little bit too strange," says Darkstar's James Young.
As with Burial's new contribution to the compilation, Fostercare, you can hear discernible syllables in the distorted, chopped-up vocal that Darkstar eventually used, and your brain tricks you into thinking you're singing along; but listen more closely and you realise the vocals have been tuned just beyond recognition. The sense you get from Aidy's Girl is that the human, physical world has revolved ever so slightly out of reach. It's heartbreakingly beautiful.
For Goodman, the way forward seems to be akin to taking a set of felt-tip pens to dubstep's blank, monochrome outlines. "It's the tone colour of synths that's become important to the sound, how to fill in the mid-range without becoming annoying." For him – and for so many of this new generation of Hyperdub artists – synths are there "to create euphoria, or to create hooks, or to create something that's colourful and memorable and catchy, that's maybe slightly unsettling at the same time. I've always been fascinated by these little squiggly synths, whether it's been in jazz funk, or gangsta rap, or 80s synth-pop. That's what I love most about grime, too, that hyper-coloured sound."
'I've always been fascinated by these little squiggly synths …that hyper-coloured sound'
Sometimes this relationship with colour and art takes on a truly vivid quality: one can find blogs where the parallels between Hyperdub's music and abstract art are discussed in detail. One of those cited in such discussions is Zomby, another maverick, anonymous producer. "It's quite an odd sensation," he tells me about his occasionally synaesthesiac relationship with music. "The colours are intermittent," he says, "but the chemical that shoots through your body is the same." He cites the tonal language and "colour representation of scales" explored by Russian composer Alexander Scriabin as an inspiration.
Hyperdub artists make dance music that is hedonistically enjoyed in clubs – but with an undeniably cerebral approach that comes from the man at the top. As well as teaching the music culture BA at the University of East London, Goodman has just finished writing a book, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear, which will be published by MIT Press in December. This covers the use of the Sesame Street theme tune as a military torture device, worrying new police technology such as Long Range Acoustic Devices ("they're like acoustic water-cannons"), and the "infrasonic hum" the planet has endured since the dawn of time: "We live in the echo of the Big Bang, so the heat death of the universe is the dying out of this echo."
Another mysterious strain of the Hyperdub virus is the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), which Goodman helped create in the late 1990s, while studying at Warwick University. "We were all graduate philosophy students, but writing about jungle and philosophy, or Cronenberg films and philosophy, for example. We were told it didn't fit into the discipline – it never really got acknowledged by Warwick.
"It was an attempt to look at popular culture, cyber culture and rave culture, and bring it together with difficult French philosophers. We were treating popular culture as serious cultural production because it has inherent value, not just as pop …" he pauses, and self-corrects. "But that's not fair on pop – it's exactly because it was pop that it was interesting."
Despite having DJed in more than 20 countries, and having signed tracks by artists from America, Japan and Denmark, Goodman emphasises that London is still very much the heart of the label. "Even when you leave London, you don't really leave London – you still carry it with you, like a thin layer of grime on your skin. London music culture is so strong because every few years it manages to refresh itself, and rejuvenate what has become staid. Just as you're getting bored, the elements twist in a different way."
Musical mutations ... five essential Hyperdub recordings
Burial: Etched Headplate (2007)
From the Mercury-nominated album Untrue, this encapsulates Burial's unique and astonishing ability to turn an emotional breakdown on a London night-bus into six minutes of absolute musical transcendence.
Ikonika: Please (2008)
Sara Abdel-Hamid grew up on Pretty Girls Make Graves and R&B, rather than weary cliches about the greats of the UK dance music canon. This utterly addictive single combines the urgency of the former with the hooks of the latter to take electronic music to strange, punch-drunk new places.
Kode9: Black Sun (2009)
With Steve Goodman's early releases drawing deep on the well of Jamaican dread, it was his boredom with dubstep's monochrome landscapes that prompted this new direction. It's the sound of a true auteur donning the cloak of house music for the first time: but only after deliberately putting it on too hot a wash, so that all the colours run into one another.
2000F + Jkamata: You Don't Know What Love Is (2009)
A one-off by two Danish producers, this is arguably the greatest example of the "purple funk" that is currently steering dubstep towards the sexy and psychedelic, featuring a towering vocoder-treated vocal with synths straight from the west-coast G-funk of Nate Dogg and Warren G.
Darkstar: Aidy's Girl is a Computer (2009)
The newest Hyperdub 12in vinyl release, an NME favourite and one of the singles of the year. Remember in the 1990s when cyborg theorists talked about our increasing dependence on technology, about post-physical humans, and about computers with emotions? Well they only sounded slightly silly at the time because their soundtrack had not arrived; it has now.
DH
@'The Guardian'
