The best records ever to wreck a genre part 2: Caspa and Rusko - FabricLive 37

Plus Special Request, Verde Prato, Richard Norris

Obituary fans smile for the camera, Sziget 2004

The iPod may have launched in 2001 but I think I first got my hands on one in 2007, as I remember Caspa and Rusko’s FabricLive mix, which was released that December, as one of the first albums I listed to almost exclusively on headphones. For all the mix’s bass pressure, it is a record well suited to headphone listening because it is, in the very best way, kind of embarrassing and I remember the illicit thrill of walking around London revelling in all kinds of alien bass filth as people around me went about their every-day business. 

FabricLive 37 was the moment that dubstep officially became ridiculous. I first became aware of the genre sometime around 2004, with Rephlex’s Grime compilation from May of that year being an early calling card. Despite the record’s misleading name - which goes to show how up in the air things were, genre-wise at the time -  Grime was home to early dubstep cuts from MarkOne, Plastician (as Plasticman) and Slaughter Mob, which helped to bring the fledgling genre to wider attention. I attended the album’s launch at The End in London, which featured some of above artists - I only remember Plastician - making vast and rather elegant bass noises that rinsed the club’s soundsystem.

By 2007 - post Skeam’s Midnight Request Line and Mary Anne Hobbs’ Dubstep Warz on Radio One - dubstep was, if not exactly mainstream, then certainly bubbling around prominently in the underground, waiting for someone to kick it into commercial gear.

That record, arguably, was FabricLive 37, a 29-track mix CD from Fabric that was released in December 2007. I say “arguably” because you can also make a case for Hatcha’s Dubstep Allstars Vol.1 of 2004, Skream’s self-titled debut album of 2006, Burial’s eponymous debut, the Warrior Dubz compilation, Pinch’s Underwater Dancehall and probably some other records that I can’t think of right now. These albums all enjoyed an underground success in the UK. But FabricLive 37 was the record that took dubstep international, finding a warm welcome among US audiences and shaping the dubstep sound for generations to come, in ways that were not entirely welcome.

Dubstep - as the name suggests - always was heavy on bass. But, when you listen back to early classics like Midnight Request Line, Digital Mystikz’ Anti War Dub or Pinch’s Qawwali, the bass was used as a force that gave form to the music without overwhelming the senses, allowing other, often rather elegant, melodic elements room to breath. Coki’s SpongeBob was the first record I remember that turned the bass into the song’s main hook, a serrated, sickly riff that took the roof off any clubs that dared to play it. But it was an outlier - until FabricLive 37 turned up.

If Caspa and Rusko - two young DJ / producers who had just signed to Fabric publishing - had had a bit longer to think about their mix, then things might have been different. As it happened, the duo only got three days to put it together, after Fabric rejected a mix that Justice had assembled for the club’s mix series (as reported in this excellent Pitchfork piece by WiIll Pritchard). 

That meant the duo needed to use songs they knew they could license, with 15 of the album’s 29 tracks coming from Caspa and Rusko themselves and 17 taken from  their Dub Police and Sub Soldiers labels. The result was an ultra-concentrated take on the punk-ish, rowdy and very hooky brand of dubstep that Caspa and Rusko had been working on. (See: Rusko’s polemic Cockney Thug, which features a sample from the mock gangster character East End Thug from The Armando Iannucci Shows, riding a bass line as thick as Thug’s East End accent.)

Caspa and Rusko had already had an amount of success by the time the mix came around. But they were by no means the biggest thing in dubstep in 2007, coming way behind the likes of Skream, Benga, Digital Mystikz and Joker, who all favoured more refined takes on the dubstep sound. Hearing the Caspa and Rusko sound squeezed into 69 minutes of concentrated low-end lunacy on the Fabric CD, each drop more ridiculous than the last, each bass line more patently aggressive, it sounded irresistible, however. 

Sure, we all loved the late-night elegance of Midnight Request Line; but it sounded a little wimpy compared to Caspa and Rusko’s egregious energy. It helped that the mix was recorded live at Fabric itself, the duo’s selection crackling with the seat-of-the-pants energy that the short prep time demanded.

As Rusko explains in an interview with UKF, to mark the mix’s tenth anniversary, FabricLive 37 quickly blew up. “We thought it might get us a few more gigs, that’s it,” he said. “Suddenly we’re in this studio with a list of interviews from every corner of the world.” “Everyone wanted to know about dubstep,” Caspa added. “Everything that had been bubbling for years before was coming to a head. We had The Guardian, Vice, even the f*cking Sun all wanting to talk about it. Magazines, radio shows, newspapers from all over the world; Japan, Germany, Brazil, Romania. Everywhere.”

There are a number of reasons why this particular mix blew up. Dubstep was due a moment in the sun, after coming filtering out of Croydon just a few years earlier, and Fabric was a big name in the world of electronic music. As a result, Fabric’s label, which released the CD, had excellent distribution, which meant that FabricLive 37 was one of the first dubstep CDs you could buy in record stores globally. 

In his Pitchfork piece, Pritchard talks about the smoking ban, too, which came into effect in the UK in July 2007. DJs, who were faced with the prospect of half of the crowd heading outside for a cigarette the moment they dropped the pace a little, needed ever more exaggerated bangers to keep the crowd hanging on their selections. The Caspa and Rusko sound was perfect for this, its energy barely dropping for a second.

This kind of dubstep was also, frankly, a lot easier to digest for international audiences who had not been brought up on the UK’s Jamaican-influenced post-rave continuum, its maximalist riffs and lurid, attention-grabbing samples fitting in snugly with the emerging EDM scene, particularly in the US. It was like rave heavy metal and who could resist that?

None of this was a problem. I remember being happily amazed that US audiences were starting to get into this very British brand of music, one forged less than 10 km from where I was then living, in South London. Who on earth would begrudge Benga and Skream a major-label contract and lucrative touring schedule?

The problem was that this kind of dubstep turned out to be relatively easy to copy, at least in broad strokes, and that is what inevitably started to happen. Some UK dubstep producers, jealous of Caspa and Rusko’s success, started to roll out their own juddering bass odysseys. But it was in the US where this strand of dubstep really took off, with producers like Skrillex taking the Caspa and Rusko sound to vast new levels of fame.

By 2010, when Skrillex released his breakthrough EP Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites, dubstep was huge in the US, while simultaneously living under a black cloud in the UK, with British producers making frantic attempts to separate their post-dubstep / UK bass sound from the brostep that was eating America alive, a reaction that was both entirely snobbish and entirely correct, given how awful the music coming out of the US was.

Just three years on from FabricLive 37, then, dubstep was ailing. And no one in the UK wanted to listen to Caspa and Rusko, the alien metal sound of their Fabric mix a nasty reminder of what was happening across the Atlantic. If you had asked me back then if I had ever been a fan of the duo’s Fabric mix I would have probably made an embarrassed comment about “well, back in the day…” and shuffled off awkwardly to listen to James Blake.

So how does FabricLive 37 sound today? I blew the dust off my old MP3 copy and gave it a listen. Fun, is the main answer; and kind of ludicrous, but in a good way. The Guy Ritchie film samples - see Caspa’s Terminator - and MC Hammer lifts (Unitz’ The Drop) have aged poorly but the bass lines remain sharply engineered and oddly welcoming, like a moustache-twirling pantomime villain sent on stage to raise the theatrical hackles.

It helps, too, that (unlike most brostep) the music on FabricLive 37 retains just enough of a link to dubstep’s roots in reggae, from the vocal samples on Caspa’s (ahem) Big Headed Slags to the admittedly rather synthetic reggae horn sounds on Cockney Thug to Uncle Sam’s Round The World (Tes La Rok remix), which is significantly closer to Bob Marley than to Benga. The record’s bass lines may be towering and mechanical but they play off against the simmering, soulful humanity of these reggae touches. There are even melancholic, Asian-influenced strings on Caspa’s Cockney Violin, a surprisingly beautiful moment in the record that I had entirely forgotten about. 

FabricLive 37 is, in fact, a lot more varied than I had remembered: bass wobble may dominate but the mix starts off rather sweetly, not entirely throwing its lot in with filth until track six, Caspa’s The Terminator. Even then, there’s still room for a brief excursion into kuduro late on in the mix, courtesy of Buraka Som Sistema’s remix of Cockney Thug, while D1’s I’m Lovin’ nods to soulful house.

For all its lunk-headed reputation, some of the music on FabricLive 37 is genuinely innovative. Rusko’s Too Far sounds like a machine in free fall, its bass line hanging onto its sanity by a thread, while Coki’s SpongeBob remains a scorched earth mark of a tune, its production poking its fluid metal head through the screen like Arnold Schwarzenegger arriving from a dystopian future and stealing a motorbike.

Ultimately, seventeen years after its release, it remains hard to separate FabricLive 37 from the brostep madness it engendered. But we can’t blame Caspa and Rusko for that; nor can we ignore a record that changed the course of electronic music history. Like the Frankenstein’s monster of dubstep, FabricLive 37 is a welcome oddity that was perverted by history, a blast of sly humour at the rather poe-faced dubstep scene, with a smile on its face as wide as its bass lines are large.

PS I was really pleased by the response I got to the first Best Records Ever to Wreck a Genre piece last week. I have one more lined up, after this, and one more I might write. But if you have any ideas, please do get in touch.

Oslo, Norway

I don’t know if anyone reads this in Oslo. I hope so. Anyway, I will be in Oslo this weekend and would love any tips of fun musical things happening.

Some listening

Special Request - Hectic

Special Request is on some kind of magical rave fire in 2024. After the time-bending pleasure of the What Time Is Love? Sessions, he returns with SR187 - PORTAL 1, part one of 16 (I think) in which he pairs the bassline gone Squarepusher insanity of Hectic with the even better (but not yet available to stream) Pure Potential, a song where Aphex-level beat cut ups meet disco samples at a sturdy 174 BPM for jungle madness. Which sounds just like the kind of personal ad I would respond to. 

Verde Prato / Bronquio - Agertokian Neskatila

I don’t know if it’s I’ve been watching too much True Detective: Night Country but Agertokian Neskatila, taken from Erromantizismoa, the debut EP from Basque singer Verde Prato and punky Spanish producer Bronquio, reminds me of Billie Eilish at her most eerie, a kind of rotted gothic dancehall beat wrapped around Prato’s satanically pure tone. Suffice to say, people here in Spain are very excited indeed about this EP. (Oh and Bronquio’s 2022 album with flamenco singer Rocío Márquez, Tercer Cielo, also comes very heavily recommended for those who like their tradition with a touch of electronics.)

Things I’ve Done

Line Noise - With Richard Norris

Richard Norris has lived a life in music so rich with excitement that it is enough for four books, let alone his soon to be published one: Strange Things Are Happening. To recap: he made the UK’s first acid house record, became a global pop star with The Grid, worked extensively with Joe Strummer, helped to usher in the psych revival with Beyond The Wizard’s Sleeve and so much more. You can check out my Line Noise interview with him here.

The playlists

You know the drill, you follow my playlists, I get a fleeting glimpse of happiness. The long one; the 2024 one: both with lots of new music.