Back and 4th: A Hotflush Compilation Various artists (Hotflush)
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At Decibel that year, three DJs—Mary Anne Hobbs, DJG, and Sub Swara—all played the one record that seemed to sum up the way dubstep had captured the dance-music mainstream, entering into conversation with house and techno without genuflecting to them. The appeal of Joy Orbison’s “Hyph Mngo” is obvious on first listen. After a rumbling buildup, a synthesizer as big as a cruise ship and as shiny as the ocean plays a swooping riff that’s soon joined by darting bass and a pair of women’s voices, alternating the words “I do” and “Ooh!” The beat is slippery, eccentric, and funky, but it also comes down hard on the two and four; rhythmically it reads as dubstep, but it’s also easy to blend with the straighter beats of house and techno, which plenty of DJs did.
The main thing, though, is that “Hyph Mngo” seemed to transform the dour and sinister mood of dubstep. It’s as pure a dance record as anybody has made—the vocals are treated like just another instrument, another little pattern to bounce against all the others and against the beat—but the energy it builds is enormous and hopeful. Like Alex Reece’s 1995 single “Pulp Fiction,” which smoothed out the kinks in jungle’s knotty groove just enough to cross over with people who didn’t know much about drum ‘n’ bass but knew what they liked, “Hyph Mngo” made dubstep suddenly seem like it could hit the charts. It was that rare happy accident: an actual underground dance record that the mainstream caught onto.
In a way these songs are just brain puzzles set to beats, but it’s material like this that helped build an audience for dubstep and its offshoots among rock fans with a taste for electronic abstraction. Blake himself has become the go-to dubstep figure for much of this audience, in part because he’s captivated the mainstream indie media: his three EPs collectively earned the number-eight spot on Pitchfork’s 2010 top 50 albums list.
Again, I’m reminded of Reece’s “Pulp Fiction”: by treating jazzy smoothness as an end in itself rather than a useful counterweight to the rhythmic excitement of drum ‘n’ bass, this great record opened the door for a lot of bad ones. Hotflush hasn’t gone through a door like that yet. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it does.
