5 Years of Hyperdub album cover
5 Years of Hyperdub

Various Artists

2005 - 2009
Hyperdub

Albums might be the easier route to crossover critical respect, but every good dance label lives and dies by its singles. And by the time Hyperdub crossed the half-decade threshold, they had an embarrassment of riches in the 12" department, even before they had more than a handful of contributors on their roster. The 32-track compilation 5 Years of Hyperdub proves all that and then some: essentials and deep-cut favorites by early-years cornerstones Burial (“South London Boroughs”; “Distant Lights”), Kode9 + the Spaceape (“9 Samurai”; “Time Patrol”), and L.V. (“Turn Away”; “Globetrotting”) reveal both the experimental future-club range and the reggae-rooted depth of their foundational dubstep, and further salvos by next-wave contributors like Cooly G (“Weekend Fly”) and Darkstar (“Aidy’s Girl’s A Computer”) point to a looming, rhythm-upending art-dance future beyond the garage-remnant sounds the label first made its name on. Funnily enough, 5 Years of Hyperdub also anticipates the next 5 years of other labels and scenes — Brainfeeder’s joyful g-funk-goes-avant-jazz deconstructions (Flying Lotus’s “Disco Balls”; Samiyam’s “Return”), Kapsize’s wobbly macro-boogie take on UK bass (Joker solo-billed on “Digidesign” and collabing with Ginz on “Stash”), the kind of frantically restless every-beat-a-question-mark post-genre deconstructed club music that got Zomby (“Kaliko”; “Tarantula”) signed to 4AD — that Hyperdub would soon adapt to its own ends. The label’s next anniversary set five years later took four volumes to encompass; this comp shows why that amount of limitless creative sprawl was inevitable.

Nate Patrin

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