Om Unit preps a concept mixtape in the direction of early dubstep-leaning influences from ’92-’99..

A non-profit release with all proceeds going to ‘The Cause’ – a creative youth workshop organisation based in Bristol.

The tape was conceived during the dark winters of the end of ’22 and realised via days and weeks of digging into the primordial melting pot of sonic experiments that either directly or indirectly arrived in a place that might have been called ‘dubstep’ but as much as 10 years prior to the official coining of the term.

With liner notes from well-respected writer and journalist ‘Laurent Fintoni’ this 60 min cassette serves as an audible ‘hot take’ on what some might refer to as ‘proto’ or ‘pre’ dubstep, and as Laurent states in the notes..

“If sound is birth and silence death, the echo trailing into infinity can only be the experience of life, the source of narrative and a pattern for history.” – Louis Chude-Sokei

When Om Unit first sent me a copy of this mix I was struck by how the selection evoked so many memories and feelings I associated with the excitement of the mid 2000s when new styles were emerging from UK club culture. Yet all these tunes predated that period, some by more than a decade. In response to this realization the reflex might be to associate the music with linear ideas of time, whereby someone was first in capturing something — be it a vibe, a drum pattern, or a sample. Proto-jungle. Proto-garage. Proto-grime. Proto-dubstep. But this misses the point.

Ideas about music are not unique to their creator but perhaps more like versions, interpretations of the echo that is the universal feeling of the times, accessible to all and located firmly outside the limitations of time as a linear force. And sometimes musicians hear that echo too soon and their ideas are left to wait until the culture can catch up with them. We might call it accidental music, a vibe without full cultural context.

There are ghosts in the archive, echoes of ideas out of sync with the culture, stylistic outliers left to float away in the ocean of sounds we call music. The DJ finds them. We might call it digging in the crates. Or selecting. Whatever the term, the DJ uses the mix — a sacred space where continuous time can be harnessed to go beyond linearity — to expose the ghosts and let them be heard in new cultural contexts where they are no longer too early, but just right in time. Because the soul does not keep time.