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Memories of the Future
From the label’s 2004 establishment all the way through the end of 2006, two acts — Burial and label founder Kode9 — provided the vast majority of Hyperdub’s then-small catalogue. (Kevin Martin, recording under the alias Pressure for 2005’s Warrior Queen collab “Money Honey”, was the sole exception.) And you could hardly pick a better complementary pair: where Burial’s take on post-garage dubstep was spacious and mournful, founder Kode9 filled the second full-length album in the label’s history with a sense of frustrated tension that bordered on walls-closing-in claustrophobia. Partnering with the vengeful-god-voiced dread poet Stephen Samuel Gordon, b/k/a Spaceape, has just about everything do with that vibe; his hushed rumble of a voice sounds sorrowful, bitter, and empathetic all at once even when it sounds like he’s muttering his condemnations of societal dysfunction back into his own head. But he’s got some stunning beats to work off, too. Kode9’s production reinforces its own burgeoning traditions by drawing off previous ones, with the cavernous bass and horizon-wide reverb of his reggae and dub influences running deep enough to bring Lee “Scratch” Perry to mind before immediate 2-step precursors like Zed Bias. And yet when Memories of the Future pushes that cross-generational hybridization to the forefront, like in the Augustus Pablo-via-Wiley post-grime futurism of “Portal,” the Kurosawa score-lifting heat glow of “9 Samurai,” and the Nintendo-sourced 16-bit overload of closer “Quantum,” that album title starts to make a lot more sense.