The crossroads between dubstep and techno have been the site of some of the most exciting and interesting music of the past few years. The Hague’s Dave Huismans’ music as 2562 has been perhaps the most effortless and natural invocation of techno through dubstep and bass music, and his other alias A Made Up Sound is an inversion of this approach. Viewing dubstep from the perspective of techno and especially house, A Made Up Sound is a essentially a metaphor for current trends: if techno/dubstep was the sound of 2008, dubstep/house is the burgeoning sound of 2010, with Scuba remixing Will Saul & Mike Monday (and vice versa), Lee Jones reworking Komonazmuk, and so forth.
The third twelve on A Made Up Sound’s eponymous label comes at the absolute perfect time to capitalize on this move, or at least push it in the right direction. Both tracks carry that digitally-aged, rickety sound of most of Huismann’s productions, but here it’s reconfigured into a less explicitly dubstep sound into something more relaxed, tempos hovering in the techno friendly territory of 125. The heaving forward swing of dubstep is replaced by house’s steady drive; even when the kick isn’t exactly 4/4 it sounds like it’s desperately trying to approach that sort of rigidity. “Alarm” is sped-up acid house left out so long that the acid has all but evaporated, leaving tiny craters and faint stains behind as its only traces. Even more intriguing is “Crisis,” which sounds like recent Martyn productions as it marries a dubstep bassline with staccato shards of percussion and musty clouds of digital wind. These are some of Huisman’s most understated yet complex compositions, and they’re helping to spread dubstep forward into appealing new territories.
