Kevin Martin had a fearsome rep long before he became one of dub’s latter-day mutation specialists — one that built off the gnarled percussive assault of his work with Techno Animal and as The Bug, especially his 1997 illbient Tapping the Conversation, that established him as one of the most uncompromising producers to blow up a bassbin. But after drawing off his ragga and dancehall enthusiasms to spend the bulk of the decade pushing the limits of dub-inflected heaviness, Martin closed out the 2000s with a wonderfully counterintuitive idea: take the one relatively quiet outlier from The Bug’s otherwise heavy-hitting London Zoo, the Roger Robinson-featuring love-survives-the-void meditation “You and Me,” and build a whole new world out of it. Martin, Robinson, and visual artist Kiki Hitomi coalesced as King Midas Sound, and to call Waiting for You something of a lovers’ rock album wouldn’t be out of the question, assuming you factor in how isolating and bewildering that yearning for love can feel. Robinson’s voice finds strength in vulnerability — not just in the loneliness (“Waiting for You”) or the desire (“Lost”), but in the resolve to keep going (“I Man”) and the ability to give himself to something bigger — like music itself (“Cool Out,” where he boasts about his ability to “run ‘em out the dancehall wipin’ tears from their eyes”). And Martin’s production, pared back to a static-textured and negative-spacious throb, reveals that his appeal was never entirely about the raw power of his bass, but the warmth that radiates off it.

– Nate Patrin