Hyperdub at 20: an oral history of the pioneering London label

Goodman started Hyperdub in 1999 as a webzine, then launched the label in 2004 with a pair of singles by himself and late, great vocalist The Spaceape (first known as Daddi Gee). Both records were brilliant, scuzzy works of dubstep, cut with a pervasive sense of Londonist dread. From there, someone called William Bevan sent Goodman a CD in the post. It was a recording that would change the sound of UK electronic music, but for years nobody knew who he was. Back then, he was known only by the name of Burial.

Hyperdub’s third release was Burial’s South London Boroughs, four tracks of unparalleled headphone nectar, a nocturnal mash of zips, clicks, a Michael Jackson sample and a shitload of skin-crawling atmosphere, propelled by the rhythmic clank of a Southeastern train. When Burial released his eponymous debut album on Hyperdub a year later, it crowned him as the anonymous golden boy of London’s nascent dubstep scene. Burial was named album of the year by The Wire, and its 2007 follow-up Untrue is the closest any musician has ever come to capturing life in the 21st century. Hyperdub has been recognised as one of London’s best-ever record labels ever since.

Kode9 is often credited, perhaps apocryphally, with calling dubstep “the ghost of jungle”. During its early years, the label was defined by unplaceable sounds that came after what was once known as the ‘hardcore continuum’ – UK sounds like hardcore, jungle and garage, influenced by black electronic music in Chicago, Detroit and Jamaica. But now, the label is home to all sorts. “‘Hyperdub’ as an idea was my way of placing that tradition in a much broader context and history of the music of the Black Atlantic,” says Kode9. “‘Hyperdub’ was also a word I used [in my own head] to describe jungle and its aftermath.” 

Kode9 speaks to me in the only way he ever has: over email. But a quintet of his label signees find time to answer my questions over Zoom. Among the talking heads is Canadian singer and producer Jessy Lanza, who released her debut album Pull My Hair Back, a dripping wet work of UK-club-ready R&B, on Hyperdub in 2013. “Steve was the only one who took a chance on the album,” says Jessy. “We bonded over Trailer Park Boys and the Scottish comedian Limmy.” She produced Pull My Hair Back with Jeremy Greenspan, one half of the perennially underrated Canadian duo Junior Boys and a close friend of Kode9’s. She was a second- or third-phase Hyperdub listener, introduced to the label by records like Hype Williams’ Black is Beautiful, Laurel Halo’s Quarantine and DJ Rashad’s Double Cup. “In terms of dubstep, I really knew fuck all.”

Lanza is the first DJ I see at the Fabric Hyperdub bash. Hyperdub is what Fabric was made for: underground bass-driven night jams that make you want to shut your eyes and nod your head. That said, the crowd is pretty thin until long after 1am, and despite the happy mix of hipsters, heads and hard-to-says, there’s nobody in Room 1 that you could really describe as ‘kids’. Jessy plays garage and grime, some R&B, some footwork and some jungle, but I find myself yearning for her salubrious voice, for her to pick up the mic while she DJs, as she did in her steamy, lockdown-era Boiler Room. (“People will come up to me and say like, ‘I’ve had a lot of sex to your music,’” Jessy says. “It’s a lot of information, but it’s sweet at the same time. It could be worse. It could be weirder.”)

Kode9 gets on next and eventually does the decent thing by playing the Teklife remix of Jessy’s “Never Show Your Love”, which goes off in much the way a bag of chips might go off if presented to a flock of seagulls. The crowd is about three times as lively during Kode9’s second hour, even though nobody here can dance to footwork. At no point is that more evident than during Heavee’s “Make It Work”, a choice cut from his new album Unleash, released on Hyperdub the same day as the Fabric event. 

If you don’t know Heavee, now you do; but if you do, it’s probably because you heard his voice on “It’s Whack” with DJs Rashad, Manny and Spinn, via FlyLo FM on Grand Theft Auto V, which was many people’s introduction to the footwork sound. Heavee remembers making the song in Spinn’s basement, rapping a few lines in response to a diss track he’d heard, then falling asleep and waking up to find Rashad had finished it. With his new album Unleash, Heavee makes footwork sound like never before. In fact, I wonder if he even considers it footwork at all. “Um, yes and no,” he says, before pausing. “No. I wanted to explore different things, show appreciation to our mentors, and I want people to hear new concepts that maybe wasn’t thought of before.” 

“It’s time for something different,” Heavee announces on Unleash track “Sumthin Different”. The lyric could work as a Hyperdub tagline. “They’ve done a great job at helping us tell the story,” Heavee says about Kode9 and the gang. “In the early days, footwork was really just a Chicago thing. Hyperdub and Planet Mu giving us the space to make our music tangible again… That’s why I love them so much.” 

With Unleash and Jlin’s new album Akoma (on Planet Mu) dropping within a week of each other, footwork’s health sounds almost as good right now as it ever has. The same thing becomes apparent during Kode9’s closing gambit at Fabric, which he spends playing Rashad’s “Cant Hold Me Back”, a ridiculous flip of that Rick Ross song, on a loop for what feels like about 25 minutes. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever heard.

“I wanted to explore different things, show appreciation to our mentors, and I want people to hear new concepts that maybe wasn’t thought of before” – Heavee 

In a piece I wrote about DJ Rashad’s legacy last year, Kode9 told me he worked with the Chicago producer in much the way he works with Burial: “He sent me loads of tunes and I told him which ones I like and we narrowed it down like that.” After talking to a gaggle of Hyperdubsters it seems that the process varies a bit, but Kode9’s policy is largely to let the artists do what they want.

“[Kode9 will] send me feedback and stuff, but it’s up to me whether I take it or not,” says Loraine James. “It’s nice to be part of a label where I’m not told to make something. Every release with them I’ve just done whatever I wanted.” James has released three albums on Hyperdub that are as acclaimed as anything else from the label in the past decade. “I hear horrors of friends needing to make their music a type of way, and I’m just like, God, I could never.”

After Kode9’s Fabric set, I leave Room 1 in the hope of cryogenically freezing my brain, but instead get sucked into Room 2. Leon Vynehall is here curling out brain-melting techno. He’s not even part of the Hyperdub night, but it must be said that the crowd is noticeably younger. It’s anyone’s guess why that is, but perhaps notable is that dubstep – the genre with which, wrongly or rightly, Hyperdub is most often associated – is the last sound in its lineage yet to enjoy a revival (after jungle, drum and bass, garage and grime).

Still, you can’t accuse Hyperdub of not moving with the times. Last year, they released Brummie knob-fiddler Lee Gamble’s Models, an album made with artificial intelligence and entirely synthesised (i.e not human) voices. Models track “She’s Not” is possibly the best use of voice on a Hyperdub track since Burial’s “NYC”, and it never feels more current than when set to the TikTokable choreography of Candela Capitan’s chained dancers.

Gamble created the song by feeding commands into an AI voice generation system and seeing what came out. He says he became obsessed with “the emptiness of these voices … they’re kind of these empty souls … that record is very evocative, but at the end of the day, there’s no one there.” It’s all very Ghost in the Shell, one of many cyberpunk texts that inspired a lot of early Hyperdub music. 

“The street always has its own uses for technology,” says Kode9, paraphrasing a line from William Gibson’s sci-fi novel, Burning Chrome. “That ethos has been the engine of most interesting sub-styles of electronic music over the years, people tinkering with machines making them do stuff they weren’t designed for, activating untapped potentials and making something on the edge of tomorrow.”

Hyperdub is proof in itself that cyberpunk is now all but obsolete, with just about everything the genre ever predicted now being a reality. “Alongside the new wave stuff like Ballard, it was my favourite style of science fiction and it certainly had a big impact on me alongside Afrofuturism,” says Kode9. All those influenced Hyperdub at its outset.” But not so much now. “The aesthetic quite doesn’t hit in the same way that it did in the 90s, probably because it’s just part of everyday dystopian normality now. We’re inside it.”

“The street always has its own uses for technology” – Kode9

Fabric feels increasingly cyberpunk as the hours before sunrise slip past. I return to Room 1 to see Ikonika and Shannen SP ruin everyone’s knees with a bunch of unshazammable amapiano and Jazzy “Giving Me”. After their set is Aya, a musician whose widely adored debut album im hole came out on Hyperdub in 2021. Aya met Kode9 in 2012 when she was a teenager: he was showing an adaptation of Chris Marker’s 1962 dystopian short film La Jetée in Bristol, and she went along with some friends. “We went up to him afterwards, trying to get him to leak some unreleased Burial tunes to us,” she says. “Just like, proper 17-year-old knobhead kind of stuff. We were like, ‘We had a plan to hold you down and tickle you until you gave us a full version of ‘Speedball 2.’’ And he went: ‘Well, there’s two problems with that. The first is that the minute-and-a-half version of ‘Speedball 2’ that’s on YouTube is all there is of that song. It never got finished. And the second problem is that I’m not ticklish.’”

So what about Burial? When I ask my Zoom interviewees if they’ve ever met him, it’s a bit like asking if they’ve ever met Jesus. Three of them say no. Loraine James just laughs. I forget to ask Lee Gamble during our call, so email him via Hyperdub PR Marcus. Gamble replies simply “lol”. 

Marcus cuts in to say that he has in fact met Burial, and that sometimes they send each other photographs of their cats. Kode9 says he still speaks to him regularly. Stupidly, I ask what they talk about. “Well he’s spent 20 years maintaining some privacy and distance from the public eye, so I’m not going to talk about the content of our conversations,” is Kode9’s reply. 

I also ask if Kode9 has heard DJ Seinfeld’s recently viral “Archangel” edit, which some people got quite upset about. “I have heard it. I can see it working in some clubs… It is what it is… But one of the most boring things about the internet is Burial discourse.” That may or may not be a dig. “It’s usually totally embarrassing.” It’s almost definitely a dig. “In the absence of food to digest, the body will start eating itself and then vomit its own stomach. An unfortunate side effect of not playing the press game I suppose.” 

But Hyperdub is not all about Burial. As the sun rises rudely outside Fabric, Aya lets loose a barrage of breakneck rave tunes inside Room 1. When even her own label-mates could be forgiven for going to bed, she delivers possibly the most impressive set of the night, splicing happy hardcore into Egyptian techno like some sick taxidermist, moving a bit like Ian Curtis behind the decks, stitching and weaving between invisible missiles while cutting everyone into shapes. 

When the night’s finally done, it’s no longer night at all. Outside the club, Farringdon is awake and certain types are already doing Saturday morning. Some other types are hanging outside the Fabric gates with speakers, playing UK underground standards and spitting bars over them. Nobody seems to mind. 

It might be a dystopia, that cyberpunk future might have come true, and all hope of the world being saved might be totally lost. But at least there’s this. Kode9 sums it up: “I definitely think some of the music we’ve released over the years taps into some of that depressing bleakness, faces it front on, and then gives you a big hug.”