Classic Albums: Scuba Triangulation
Hotflush Recordings, 2010
In 2007 the British producer Scuba upped sticks and headed for the bright lights (and pounding bass) of Berlin city. He’d been part of the London dubstep scene since day dot. Watching it grow out of the garage sound of the new millennium, shaping it with his Hotflush Recordings label in the immediate years after, and then basking in its glow during The Boom, circa 2006.
Now he fancied a change of scenery, in every sense.
“By then [Dubstep] was really well established,” he says. “The Americans had picked up on it, and it was a pretty driving global scene. I really felt quite alienated from that.”
For this ‘post-dubstep’ phase (a term he always found “unimaginative”), he set up shop at the legendary Berlin clubbing fortress, Berghain, establishing the night SUB:STANCE.
“It just felt quite open, musically,” he says. “We were booking all this weird crossover stuff, and drum & bass acts, as well as some of the more interesting house and techno DJs.”
Also in the mix was UK funky (“another terrible term”), and a new alternative sound he’d latched onto through dBridge & Instra:Mental’s Autonomic podcast.
“They were experimenting with primarily melodic and dubstepinfluenced takes on drum & bass, with ’80s aesthetics and sci-fi stuff like Blade Runner,” he says.
In his new home, he’d found another exciting palette of sounds to draw on. Once again, he felt like he was in the middle of something fresh. A feeling he would spend the next few years exploring, for what would eventually become Triangulation.
“Basically, what I was trying to do with the album was to marry all these things together,” he says. “I didn’t really sit down and think about making an album that covered all these influences. But, looking back on it, that was definitely happening.”
It heralded another forward-thinking production wave from the former Londoner, and would prove, once again, that the most exciting thing about electric music is its ability to embrace change.
“That was the major thing on my mind, at that time,” says Scuba. “Squaring up the whole circle between UK broken and ‘hardcore continuum’ inflected music, with that European house and techno ubiquity.”