Digidesign / You Don't Know What Love Is

Joker invented what got called the “purple sound” in Bristol around 2008–09: a mutation of the dubstep template that grafted G-funk synth leads and Sega Mega Drive chiptune textures onto the 140bpm chassis. Steve Goodman (Kode9) signed Joker, Ikonika, and Zomby to Hyperdub as a deliberate response to dubstep going “monochrome and gray” — the same critique Reynolds makes of “intelligent” subgenres in general. Kode9’s phrase for dubstep was “the ghost of jungle,” which is Reynolds’s entire argument about the hardcore continuum compressed into four words.

Kode9 has a PhD in philosophy from Warwick and wrote Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (MIT Press, 2009). His collaborator Mark Fisher (k-punk, Capitalist Realism) was a co-founder of the early Katasonix label. The intellectual scaffolding behind Hyperdub is more fully articulated than that of almost any other techno/dance label — which is either impressive or ironic depending on your relationship to Reynolds’s critique of intelligence as a dance-music value judgment.