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?
