HYPE THE HYPE

Dubstep, a small subgenre in electronic music that sounds like slowed down drum 'n bass or two-step and mainly coming from London, is taking over the world. Rapidly. We're not going to boast here: apart from the odd song or two, we at Lock it Down never heard before of this kind of music. There is no shame about it, it's a London underground thing which kept to themselves a lot. Sure, nowadays, when even all papers in Holland are writing about this new craze and dubstep is all over the internet, you'll find people boasting about it like they were the first ones to discover it. But where were all those people when the artists, that are now receiving great reviews, were performing mostly to other dubstep artists in the scene? We at Lock it Down are honest: we weren't there. And that is just a damn shame, because, frankly, dubstep is the best thing that ever happened to electronic music as it is.

Smoothly combining the roots of Jamaican dub with its grandson drum 'n bass, two-step and grime, dubstep is taking things further where many people thought things couldn't be stretched anymore. The recipe is simple: slow down, speed up and go low.
We'll define that for you: slow down the riddim but make it so that you can dance twice as fast to it and make the bass sounds even lower and "wobble" it more as ever. Difficult? Yes. The riddims might sound complex to unexperienced listeners: I went to a dubstep party where most of the people there couldn't understand how to dance to the slowed down beat. Only after the dj (Kode 9) plugged and perfectly mixed a record that was twice as fast as his record already playing, the crowd understood that dubstep is also suitable to dance that old-fashioned drum'n bass stylee to. And thus it became a great party after all, that gained dubstep a lot of new fans. Myself included.

Being an avid fan of reggae dub, electronic dub, drum 'n bass and electronical music like IDM (terrible name!) I found myself somewhat bored after a couple of years. The "amen break" has been sampled to death, electronic dub artists seem to do nothing else but either copy themselves or Zion Train, and IDM, nowadays, is all about producing lame beats with acoustic guitars and rappers or taking it way too far in timing beats and breaks. And then I heard dubstep...It fitted perfectly with what I was searching for: innovative beats, massive sound, heavy bass and something new in general. Here's a small overview of "must hear" artists and "must see" sites.
Convince yourself.

Kode 9
Heavyweight producer who's involved in a lot of the records you hear nowadays.

Skream!
20 year old wonderkid who supposedly wrote about 1500 tracks already, but Skream! is also responsible for one of the best dubstep albums released up till now.

L-Wiz
Not from the UK, but hailing from Scandinavia, this guy's one of the most innovative dubstep artists.

Loefah
Very creative when it comes to building riddims. Also the one that brings the bass down lower then everyone else.

Burial
Dubstep's first superstar

Digital Mystikz
Pioneers and leading producers of this scene. Very creative, with both strong takes on old style dub as new-style dub techno.

HyperDub
Dubstep record company number one

Tempa
Dubstep record company number two

Dub Police
Dubstep record company number three

Dubstep forum
All there is to it: you'll find it here. The newest productions, gossip and shows.

Barefiles
All the newest mixes, productions and mash-ups can be downloaded from this site.

Of course there is a lot more to be found on both the web as on vinyl. To name just a few to bare in mind are: Wavescape, Taken and Various. But these links will give you a nice start. From there on, you're lost.
Promised...