Dub Techno, Club’s Weediest Genre, Rises Again
Chronicling dance music’s current pendulum shift to lower, slower sounds that go on forever
When clubs began opening back up after COVID lockdowns, it made complete sense that the mantra in music circles seemed to be: Harder. Faster. Poppier. After months of livestreams and thinkpieces about the healing powers of ambient music, losing your shit to a jungle flip of Ciara was medicinal. At first, it was trance and progressive house that captured the zeitgeist, but even the sugar highs of those genres soon began to taste like flat Diet Pepsi compared to Eurodance, hard house, and gabber. As things got faster and more brazen, it was only a matter of time until an eventual backlash would congeal from both the dance music intelligentsia and punters alike. I mean, when one of the scene’s biggest DJs is cancelling gigs that can’t accommodate his private jet and people are rinsing hardstyle remixes of the “Macarena,” you know a shift is overdue.
If the changeover was inevitable, it’s genuinely surprising that one of the newest contenders for the clubland limelight is that introspective and loopy favorite of festival stoner tents: dub techno. Thumbing through recent releases from many of dance music’s vanguard—including Huerco S. (under his Loidis alias), Purelink, Fergus Jones, and Eden Aurelius—it’s clear that something is in the water (or weed). Change is afoot when perennial tastemaker CCL drops a mix of reverb-warped negative space, or when there are references to Berlin’s long-forgotten home of minimal, Bar25, in the write-up for new Resident Advisor mixes.
So how did we get here? While the origin story of dub techno is well-known lore, it’s worth quickly rehashing the SparkNotes version: In the mid-1990s, Berlin pioneers Mark Ernestus and Moritz Von Oswald, aka Basic Channel, fell in love with early Detroit techno and began to apply the Jamaican dubbing technique of delay and reverb to the tracks. The effect yielded a shimmering style of minimal club music that was indulgent and mesmerizing, like getting hypnotized in Egyptian cotton.
When the genre moved back across the Atlantic in the later ’90s and early 2000s, that decadence began to atrophy as the sound was stripped to its component parts. It became one of the most elemental dance music forms out there. To get a taste of this iteration, revisit any release from American dub techno pioneers DeepChord, which started in 1997 as a project between longtime pals Rod Modell and Mike Schommer. They fell in love with “dirty, lo-fi, minimal, repetitive, noisy, techno with a lot of effects,” as Schommer has described it, and the two wanted to see just how far they could reduce their songs without losing a core sense of groove. The resulting records—2000’s LP dc01 - 06 and five 12-inches released throughout 2001—are dub techno at its platonic best. The A-side from dc11 isn’t much more than a series of undulating chords that pan across the stereo, while little slivers of drum pulse alongside. It lasts more than 18 minutes, and still feels too short.
As if to welcome the current shift in dance music taste, one of early dub techno's lost masterpieces, Schommer’s 2002 limited-run CD-R dc15, was finally remastered and released on vinyl this fall by Rubadub Records. dc15 captures the apex of the first era of American dub—steely minimal techno with tiny crocuses of synthetic beauty peeking out from the layers of echo and delay.
Back in the spring of 2023, there was another big reissue, this time from the ethereal high priest of dub, Paul St. Hilaire, better known as Tikiman. St. Hilaire rose to prominence in the early ’90s with his poetic and skeletal take on the genre, making enough waves to have the Basic Channel crew give him his own sub-label. The retrospective, Tikiman Vol.1 (along with this year’s reissue of St. Hilaire and René Löwe’s legendary 2003 12-inch Faith), has brought the producer to a whole new generation of bass bin worshippers.
Modern dub techno artists are not just offering imitations of past triumphs, though. They’re rethinking what the genre can be. Chicago trio Purelink’s Signs brings together the ethos of the ambient underground—think labels like Berlin’s 3XL and Brooklyn’s 29 Speedway—and fuses it with the sunken rhythms of dub techno. There is a similar feel to Eden Aurelius’ debut EP from earlier this year (which fittingly features a remix from Purelink), where you can tell she grew up listening to as much so-called “deconstructed club” as she did Jamaican dub pioneer Lee “Scratch” Perry. Fergus Jones’ outstanding Ephemera folds little flecks of shoegaze and trip-hop into dub techno frameworks, as constant sub wobbles pull down the break-of-dawn melodies. The vibe is more club-oriented on Loidis’ One Day, where dubbed-out bits of tech house form meditative tracks where the loop could go on forever.
Let me be clear: Dub techno has never really gone out of style. Just look at producers like Canadian hero Deadbeat or the (very tricky to Google) Icelandic stalwart Thor, who have been stripping back dance music to its core hypnotic groove for over two decades. But the question remains: Why is dub techno starting to resonate with a much larger audience right now? It isn’t just the influx of dub techno releases—more and more people are falling down the dub rabbit hole, whether revisiting an old favorite or hearing it for the very first time (check the comments on this mix, for example). Its imprint is starting to show up in unlikely places; you can catch a whiff of it in the bombastic club DJ Madam X’s recent barnstorming techno release.
My money is on the fact that dub techno offers an antidote to our dwindling cultural attention spans. Not much happens in a dub techno track. This is music that requires you to lean in and really try to find the micro-details and slight tonal shifts over extended run times. A recent release from the collaborative project SnPLO is appropriately titled Seven Hundred and Fifty Loops, while Amsterdam’s Mammo just released a 12-inch called Slows the Pace and Goes Farther. Both are made up of dubbed-out grooves where occasional flourishes pop—a lethargic synth here, a hand drum there—but really, this is dance music for soul-searching introspection.
As more and more contemporary takes on dub get rinsed at your favorite local club, and the prices on old Chain Reaction releases skyrocket, it’s tempting to speculate about what’s next for dub techno. Will Charli XCX’s next record be a dubby Brat, rechristened Braaa? Will Tomorrowland book Tikiman? Probably not. But I’m OK with that. As someone who has always appreciated the gentler moments on the dancefloor, I’m ready for a little less conversation and even less action.
