Kode9 & The Space Ape

The first time I did not like it. I did not even like it the second time. But after the third listening it began to dawn. I think dubstep is about the first post-rave style of music coming from the UK that is sad, elegiac and introspective rather than the other way around. Not surprisingly then that it is the first post-rave style that succeeds not only in attracting my attention but also in keeping it. There is an apparent empty core to this music, more impressionist than expressive. It is as if both the music and the singing on Memories of the Future are deliberately not begging for your attention. Which is utterly strange, I must admit, but I just cannot phrase it differently.

Everytime I put this record on I am desperately searching for a compass, for a destination, while at the same time the suspicion starts to linger that a direction is not at all that which you should be looking for. It bridges the gap to another dimension, not to another place. This gives the music a depth and purpose that I have always found lacking in drum'n'bass, 2-Step, broken beat and any other post-rave UK dance genre.

It is a kind of music that fleets you by, as if you are passing a derelict and depopulated district of a city and you hear music, but you are not entirely certain where it originates from. You are not even entirely certain it is really there. You feel like the boy wandering around in Ballard's Chronopolis, wondering who takes care of all those clocks. It is incomparably elusive and vague, music for searchers rather than finders.

Everytime the music is over, it is as if it disappears from memory altogether. But when you put it back on, you are immediately transported back to a no man's land of the spirit, some kind of eerie demilitarized zone that is reminiscent of Ballard's Terminal Beach, a place where you can quietly immerse your self into the memories that at any other place you would rather avoid, "lost in paranoia's most beautiful dream"

Strangely enough the repeated listening of this record has also initiated a renewed interest in the Burial album, another record that at first I did not grasp at all, a turnaround so dramatic that now I am beginning to think that these two records might be among my records of the year.