Send "Scuba " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 There's been no shortage of dialogue around how dubstep has exploded and splintered into countless fragments-- disparate but still interlinked shards reflecting shades of techno, house, garage, drum'n'bass and everything else under the sun. English-born Paul Rose has historically been one of the earliest agents of this dubstep disintegration, making the move to techno haven Berlin early and establishing an interest in the genre that soon became commonplace among many of his genre contemporaries. Founding what would become one of the leading institutions in the techno/dubstep fusion with his Hotflush Recordings label and unprecedentedly landing a residency at the world's most infamous techno club, Berghain, Rose-- better known as Scuba, SCB, or Spectr-- has been a leading light in dissolving the boundaries between different worlds of dance music.But no matter how experimental or cross-boundary this particular sphere of music gets, there's always a line drawn between all these iterations of "bass music" and what might be considered "proper" techno and house. It's the reason why Rose splits his time between Scuba (bass music) and SCB (straight-up techno), why his memorable RA podcast was a "versus" between his alter egos, and why his SUB:STANCE club night happens on Fridays at Berghain and not Saturdays. It's the reason why his only previous commercial mix CD as Scuba focused almost exclusively on dubstep-centric sounds with none of SCB trickling in. But all bets are off with Rose's contribution to the long-running DJ-Kicks series, where that border fence between "bass" and techno is finally demolished. Mixing genres isn't anything out of the ordinary anymore (in fact, it's pretty much expected), but rarely do we see this kind of flitting between extremes in such a small and confined space. I'm tempted to say that the overarching theme here is techno, but it's a weird sort of techno. Even when we get big names like Surgeon and Marcel Dettmann, we're not given chunky workouts or sleek, streamlined bangers, but the militarist thrust of "The Power of Doubt" and the jerky IDM of "Captivate". Rose prefers these album cuts over easily more functional single material from either producer, which says a lot about his outside-the-box approach here. Forgoing both the instant-gratification quick mixing of bass music DJs and the lengthy blends of Berlin techno jocks, the tracks feel like they're melting in and out of each other, which means their generic signifiers melt away as well. Rose's style is a fastidious ebb and flow of microscopic beat-stitching. Structurally, Scuba's DJ-Kicks throws another curveball: It doesn't build toward any particular climax, nor is it centered around the "drop" structure inherent to most bass music. The closest we get are the bits of warm melody that seep in with tracks like Braille's jazzy "Breakup" or Mr. Beatnick's elegant G-funk epic "Don't Walk Away From My Love"....full text |
| Dj-kicks |
| The one thing that Paul Rose, better known as Scuba, really doesn’t want you to do is to try and pin him down. His roots are in London’s dubstep scene, but he lives in the techno metropolis of Berlin. His music is located at some unspecified point between those two cities – bass heavy, sparse, full of atmosphere and with propulsive rhythms, but above all impossible to define. His label, Hotflush, is one of dubstep’s spiritual homes, with releases by Distance, Benga and Mount Kimbie, but it also has that hard-to-categorize quality Warp had in the ’90s. He is, in a word, a maverick. No surprise, then, that his DJ-Kicks mix resists pigeon-holing. A mind-bending 32-track journey, it ranges from the doom-laden ambience of “HF029B2″ by Sigha, to the stripped down squelches and bleeps of “Acid Battery” by Boddika and the muted keys of Jichael Mackson’s “Gedons.” It’s deep, a set that engages your mind as well as your feet. “It’s loosely based around the last couple of sets I’ve played at my club night, Sub:Stance, at Berghain in Berlin,” explains Rose. “It’s the last set of the night. It’s longer than the other sets. We tend to have lots of people playing for 90 minutes. But the last set is at least three hours or more, so you have more freedom. It’s really varied. You can play more or less anything and people will stay with you. That’s so special. A key thing I’ve been doing in those sets is starting off faster, say 138, and slowing down. It’s really gradual, slowing each tune down a little bit. The idea was to condense that three hour set into an hour. It drops about 12 bpm over the hour, from 136 to 124. Each tune is a little bit slower. I don’t like mixes that jump around, I prefer things to flow.”...full text |
| Electronicbeats |
| In a historic moment London’s darkness and Berlin’s concrete ’n’ strobe lights fuse into one and create the twilight sound of a futuristic society that does not succumb to a nine to five rhythm but crawls relentlessly from one place to the next, eyelids pinned to a sticky palate lusting for more. In the heart of this slow twitching movement: Paul Rose the Englishman who hides behind the underwater moniker Scuba, and his Hotflush Recordings imprint alongside the Berghain Substance parties, manage to capture the of this zeitgeist movement; Eerie, spiritual, hi-tech and home brewed. Hotflush, Substance and Scuba himself were not only marking tendencies, they constantly rewrote history whilst fusing the deep channel frequencies of Berghain techno with the future dub and sub bass of dubstep in a quadrillion different ways. Reinventing the genre again and again, it did not stop there. Activating the kaleidoscopic magic of recombination and reactivation, Scuba has even more in stock, and there’s no better guardian of the dalliance than Scuba himself. By mixing a musical overview which is more than a punctual status quo, he’s produced the perfect showcase for K7’s DJ-Kicks series, a beacon of musical education. For those who watch and follow his every move and follow his footsteps, there is enough exclusive material to whet their appetites and sink their teeth in: tracks byJichael Mackson, Roska, Surgeon, Braille, Quest, Sex Worker, and Bodikka are just a few of the highlights. Loosely based on a closing set Scuba has been hammering at the Substance parties, it manages to capture these special moments generated at the end of a party when people follow guidance and enjoy connections at the highest level. Marking his own tendency, to slow things down and travel flowingly, Scuba’s mix is slowly loosens the tension and until hips level out spaciously....full text |
Scuba lyrics
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