Scuba - A Mutual Antipathy (2008)

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"Garnering much widespread attention from the heads and tastemakers, Scuba's recent move to Berlin has been cited as a large influence on the album and his current direction within the dubstep movement, a scene which he makes clear in the recent Woofah interview that he likes to maintain a healthy distance from. After we have moved past the unfortunately retrogressive IDM tweeness of opener 'systematic decline', the album blossoms into 'hard boiled', the killer cut spotted on the album sampler 12", a wide open slice of dubstep minimalism owing a very large debt to the skeletal rhythmic convolutions of T++ and Berlin style dub techno, but essentially retaining his melodic watermark. 'Tell her', the other cut from the sampler, harks back to the Scuba productions of yesteryear with those smacking rock style snares and bass drops, but thankfully balances these with a beautiful piano motif to alleviate the pressure. 'Disorder' meanwhile sounds quite unlike anything we've heard from this fella before, embarking on a quasi industrial techno trip with rough cut metallic percussion battered into stomping patterns. The industrial attitude prevails through 'ruptured', and onto the lo-slung ambience of 'the upside' and the rhythmic experimentation of ' twitch'. The album reaches it's pinnacle with 'stolen', sounding more like an Autechre offcut from 'Amber' than anything Berlin related. Mr Rose hasn't let any dancefloor obligations hold him back with this album and has obviously enjoyed the freedom this has allowed him to experiment and rethink the Scuba sound, taking it to a more subdued, emotionally complex level. The result is a deep and heady album that should broaden the horizons of Dubstep, serving as a companion piece to Burial's after-hours lights-down-low blueprint..."
via boomkat