As the wake of dubstep's dramatic push into the mainstream continues to stir up the waters of electronic club music, genre meltdown is all the rage. It's all “nu” this, “post” that and “future” the other, as a thousand hybrid sub-sub-genre names are pulled out of the air to try and sum up what is going on. And as often as not, key releases like Joy Orbison's 'Hyph Mngo' and Mount Kimbie's 'Crooks & Lovers' album are held up as somehow representative of this highly variegated zeitgeist.
What this last tendency fails to register, though, is that Joy Orbison and Mount Kimbie are just the latest of a long and distinguished line of individualist artists going right back to 2003 and the birth of dubstep who have been nurtured by the Hotflush label. Hotflush is an institution that was always just beyond or just outside dubstep, even as it released foundational tunes for the scene. From the very beginning in 2003, it brought out the fine detail of dubstep's mongrel nature, emphasising its kinship not just to garage, dub and techno, but to breaks, ambient and post-Aphex Twin electronica – different elements of these sounds coming together not into some homogeneous blur, but into unique, precisely-engineered structures.
There can be coherence in diversity, though. Core dubsteppers like Benga, Distance and Loefah, and maverick talents like Boxcutter, Pangaea and 2562 alike, have been able to come into the orbit of Hotflush and – despite the variety of their talents – contribute to a label aesthetic which sounds strikingly consistent from 2003 right through to the newly commissioned tracks from the likes of Roska and dBridge on this collection. It's a shadowy aesthetic, one that doesn't give up its secrets easily, full of hints and clues, often suggestive of deep reflection – yet always, whether its rhythms are that of dubstep, techno, garage, acid house or something more abstracted, rooted in the moving mass of bodies in dark clubs.
At the heart of all this is the main man, Paul Rose – Scuba. Not only has his own music embodied all of these influences and tendencies, but in his move to Berlin he helped define the Hotflush mentality – not abandoning the UK, but bringing it with him, injecting it right into the dark heart of Berlin's scene via his Sub:Stance nights at the infamous Berghain club. Again, the connections and cross-fertilisations are not vague things, random attempts to fuse “a little bit of everything, man”, but very precise realisations of what works together, based on one individual's real experiences in the world.
And that's what Hotflush is, pretty much. In the decentred, internationalist internet age where everyone's a freelance, marshalling so many individualist talents should result in a mess, a carcrash, a tower of Babel. But Hotflush remains living proof that clear vision and clear understanding of music and personalities can create from this myriad of voices and influences something that grows over time as a distinct and influential musical entity in its own right. Maybe the zeitgeist needs to catch up with that.
