‘I was dazzled. I thought the walls would fall down’: the oral history of DMZ, the label and club night that gave dubstep its soul | Dubstep

By the turn of the millennium, British electronic music had some growing pains. The jungle and drum’n’bass scenes that energised the 1990s were running out of creative gas, and garage had shifted from the moody underground into champagne flash and chart hits. Across pockets of London, Croydon and Essex, a tiny group of artists coalesced around a new idea. After 15 years of high-octane beats, they decided to strip the breakbeats, hard partying and cliquishness out of dance music, focusing instead on soundsystem fundamentals: bass, space and togetherness. From there, dubstep was born.

As we approach the 25-year anniversary of dubstep’s beginnings, I’ve documented the genre in my book, Aftershock: The Seismic Impact of Dubstep: an oral history of its origin story told through 28 artists and key figures. Some of the most influential are part of DMZ, a record label and party series led by south London DJ-producers Mala, Coki and Loefah, and MC Sgt Pokes. With its anti-VIP ethos, DMZ became one of dubstep’s driving forces, and earlier this year, Mala and Coki performed at Fred Again’s residency at London’s Alexandra Palace: their influence is shifting to a new generation of fans.

In this condensed excerpt, the DMZ crew speak about their approach to music and how they created a centre of power for the genre. Lauren Martin

Joe Nice, DJ and an early US champion of dubstep: Dubstep was such a departure from what dance music fans were used to by the turn of the millennium. House is between 120-130bpm, twice the rate of the average resting heartbeat, so naturally, your heart moves nicely at that rhythm. House has such a metered pace that you can only move your body so fast. Drum’n’bass is 170bpm, but it usually gets pushed to plus four or plus six, which is 180bpm, so almost three times your resting heartbeat. It’s easy to move to house and drum’n’bass.

But dubstep, it’s 140bpm but feels like it’s moving at 70bpm. It’s like the Earth spinning: you know it’s moving fast, but it feels as if time isn’t going anywhere. That’s what dubstep does to you: moving, spinning, moving, spinning; but you’re in the same spot, and can move how you feel it. That’s the adjustment that many people had to make with dubstep. It’s the only genre I’ve played that has so much freedom in the sound, and within how you want to or can move with the sound. You ask yourself, “Do I move quickly, or do I let it go?” In terms of physical rhythm, it’s difficult to retrain a habit that you were literally born with.

Mala, producer and DJ: Playing your sound means that you enhance the experience of listening to it; to be able to control the environment in which people hear it. For DMZ, that’s a big dark room with a soundsystem, no fancy lights.

Coki, producer and DJ: We decided to put on a night in 3rd Base, inside Mass, in Brixton, so we went and looked at the space. When I walked in, it was like a function hall: red curtains on the side, church glass right up on the top of the roof, with the light coming in during the day. It was a nice space, with wooden floors and a little stage at the end for the pastor and choir. I thought it was kind of hollow, though. I was thinking, “How the hell are we going to fill this?”

Mala: We did our first DMZ dance in March 2005 and ran it bi-monthly from there.

Coki: I was on the door for the first ever DMZ, and everyone was getting pissed off at me because I was letting people in for free. If it was a couple of girls I’d be like, “In you go, sweetheart, never mind the fiver”. I was 25 years old, so I wasn’t exactly about business, but we did all right – we got about 10 girls in. The early days of FWD>> [London’s other seminal dubstep night] were very mans. There were maybe three girls in there. But what mattered was that DMZ was dedicated to us. At FWD>>, you’d hear maybe 10 of our tunes together, among all the sets, but DMZ was a good few hours of just our music.

Martin Clark, writer, DJ, producer and Keysound label head: By 2005, dubstep started to build a club infrastructure and mutate itself. FWD>> was tiny enough to build an original community, and it had momentum, but DMZ was a bold concept: “We can do it on this scale, and this scale.”

Joe Nice: For me, the critical mass of the sound was the first DMZ party in March 2005. I was one of only a handful of Americans that came over for it, but I met people from France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Holland and Croatia. I remember walking into the venue and thinking, “This is going to be ridiculous.” It was a huge soundsystem, and the queue was around the block and down the hill. I’d never been to a party with that many people there for one genre of music: “Something good has to come from this.”

I saw Benny Ill, then Kode9 – his set was sonic voodoo. Listening to [Kode9’s accompanying MC] the Spaceape, I was in this cocoon of sub-frequency and couldn’t move. Chef and Skream played back-to-back, which was bananas, then Digital Mystikz and Loefah played for three hours. The highlight though, for me, was when Mala played Coki’s Haunted. I remember this vividly: Mala and I drove over together, and I remember asking him, “Yo, any tunes I should look out for tonight brother?” And he just looks at me and says “Joe, Coki played this new bit and I started laughing when it dropped, I couldn’t believe it. Trust me bruv, it’s gonna be the one.”

Mala: I remember the first time that I heard Haunted, before Coki had finished it. I was sitting in my car and there really was nothing like that before. “Like, how?” I thought, “It’s so sick”. I had no idea how somebody I know created something so insane, but deep, beautiful and unique. My only reaction was to laugh at it.

Coki: I made Haunted specifically for the first DMZ dance in 3rd Base. Our mentality was to make tunes to hear out loud. It’s boring listening to it at home – you wanna hear the impact and definition.

Loefah, producer and DJ: If it was a brand new tune, within 10 seconds of it dropping, if it was so mind-blowing you’d have to pull it up [rewind it and play it again]. It wasn’t a signal as much as, “What the fuck was that?” The crowd at DMZ used to reach over the decks and pull the tracks back themselves. If Skream or Mala reached out from behind you and pulled your brand new tune up, it was a sign of acceptance from the scene.

It was part of the pace of the night. There were DMZ sets where someone would play for two hours and in those two hours, they’d play 10 tunes because there were so many rewinds. It wasn’t a bad thing, either. It was the most amazing thing in the world. We’d brought it from what we’d observed from growing up in jungle raves, and a bit of dancehall, too. You’d pull it up so hard the needle would bounce.

Joe Nice: Mala faded a tune out and Haunted started. The whole crowd went nuts. You had grown-ass men acting like toddlers when the bassline dropped; dudes jumping up and hugging each other like they just won a championship. Pull it up, drop it again. Someone from behind the decks walks up and stops it; the crowd is going crazy. Sgt Pokes is on the mic. The third time, before the drop, Benny Ill, from the front of the crowd, reaches over the decks and stops the track. The crowd boos, but they love it; they’re having it, screaming “What the fuck?”

Coki isn’t even at the decks. He’s in the corner, smoking up, watching the mayhem he’s created from a tune he’d made maybe a week or two prior. They let the crowd noise die down a bit, and Mala puts it on again. By the fuzz at the start of a record, Skream walks up and stops it – that’s four pull ups now. Only on the fifth time did it get played out [to completion]. I think Coki managed to play five tracks in his half hour set because every tune got pulled up at least two or three times.

Anti War Dub [by Digital Mystikz, a duo of Mala and Coki], Bury Da Bwoy [by Mala], Goat Stare and Root [both by Loefah] were played out for the first time that night. When I heard Goat Stare – the way that snare slaps you in the face, that bassline cascading, like off a cliff – I was dazzled. I thought the walls were going to fall down.

In the US, we didn’t have rigs with no limiters, playing this music in a room with 30ft ceilings, pummelling you with bass. I was jet-lagged and had been at the venue since 8.30pm. Now, it’s nearly 6am, and I’m every synonym for tired that you can think of, and I’m having the time of my life. I will never forget that night. It was a watershed moment in dubstep.

Martin Clark: Digital Mystikz, in a way, established a new centre of power with DMZ at Mass. They could book and not book people. Those who got their break at DMZ would go on to be huge.

What people think of dubstep now is only half of what the dubstep scene really was. The other side was a much smaller but intense group of people, who wanted to take the percussive patterns of garage and make them more breaky; building on from DJ Zinc’s [1999 track] 138 Trek. In the early days of FWD>>, those dubstep and breakstep camps were relatively harmonious, but by 2004-2005, they started to really not get on. There was a huge amount of infighting. What ended up happening was that not only did the group that became known widely as dubstep get the dubstep moniker, but they also focused much of it around DMZ.

The other, core reason why DMZ accelerated was not only because of the quality of their music, but the emotional range within it. Loefah’s dread halfstep is fundamentally different to the structure of, say, an Anti War Dub, Neverland [by Mala] or Burnin’ [by Coki]. These tunes are big in different ways. D1 could have a trance feel, Mala had this percussive energy, Loefah had this extreme dread and Coki felt like jump-up rage. The feeling was something like: “The thing that we are working on has the minimum things in common in order to make it coherent, but there’s space to explore.”

Mala: I think about how we were as people, and how I was writing music as Digital Mystikz, with the phrase “meditate on bassweight”. We were trying to put out a universal energy where there was no segregation, no VIP in the dance. The person playing first was just as important as the people playing the middle and the end. Some DJs don’t understand that. They think because they’re a certain name, or have a certain status, apparently above others, then they should be given a certain set time. We’d be like, “Nah, forget that – it’s about a musical progression, an experience.” Everyone was welcome. People would stand behind you and look in your record box. People in the audience were reloading records. We never frowned on that. As it happened, too, DMZ was peaceful. We were very lucky to have almost nothing bad happen in the dances, especially being in the centre of Brixton.

Coki: We were mystical. The style then was very minimal, so it was open to atmospheric sounds to come through, with vocals that enhanced certain vibrations. It puts people on a different level: come in and smoke, it’s not a jump-up thing; it’s strictly bass, with a little snare here and there, a few hats and this vast atmosphere. It felt like you were vibing underwater.

Loefah: People were getting shot and stabbed in clubs at the time, and dubstep made a real effort to be apart from all that. That’s what Anti War Dub is about, really – not uplifting and happy, but safer.

Mala: I wanted to prove myself to the world, and myself. Society says that, to be a man, you have to be a certain type of way – to have a car and a mortgage – so I think part of that exploration of oneself in society was being channelled into making music. As a result of that, we shaped our own sound. I’ve always felt that I was given all this time to explore myself – how I interacted with the world and how the world interacted with me – and that it’s such a shame that the majority of people are not able to experience life with this amount of free time.

I felt guilty for that for a very long time. My dad was a painter and decorator all of his life, and there was me, doing what I was doing, and feeling guilty that I didn’t have to graft like he did. But then my dad turned around to his neighbour one day and said, “If I could come back and live again I’d want to live as my son”, which was probably the nicest thing anybody has ever said to me.

Coki: Everyday life is a war of sorts: clashing words with people, messing with your mind. If you’re a person who commits violence, you interpret it in a different way to someone who’s going through something in their heads. We saw that play out in the music scene. Garage and grime raves were getting crazy. There was too much fighting and bad mindedness in the dance – and we were like, “Leave it.”

The guy that put the vocals on Anti War Dub is my cousin’s friend who lives in Jamaica, Spen G. I was writing … not reggae, but music along those lines, just trying to learn how it’s done. For one beat, my cousin’s friend wrote the vocals for it. I didn’t use the vocals for a reggae track in the end, gave it to Mala, and he came up with Anti War Dub instead.

It was overwhelming for me to be a part of something like that track, still, to create that type of feeling. The first time I heard Anti War Dub with the vocals I thought, “Yeah, this is straight G, fam.” Everyone was going through turmoil in life then, and the track was another way of relating to people on a different level instead of just doing that party thing all the time. Every year there’s some war, some conflict, some shit; people related to it, understood it.

Major keys and minor keys generate totally different atmospheres and energies. I was always on the black keys. The way I saw it: the music isn’t nihilistic. It’s not destruction and darkness. But at the same time, things are kind of grey and life is a struggle, you know? There’s this darker tone in the black keys which produces a melancholic vibe, and I find a realness in that.

Mala: We did our first DMZ dance of 2006 on the first Saturday after New Year’s Eve. The owner of the venue, Mick, was like, “You’re all mad. Why are you putting a party on? New Year’s Eve was the weekend before and no one’s going to come.” But my mentality was, “You can only hear this music in this one club in the whole world,” and I felt confident that people would come out to the dance. That first year, there was a new record attendance of people that turned up.

The DMZ first birthday dance was 4 March 2006. Loefah and I did an interview with the BBC for a documentary before the doors opened, and afterwards, we went outside and saw a queue. One hour before opening, the queue keeps growing and growing. We were so excited, couldn’t believe it: within an hour of opening, we were at full capacity: 450-or-so people inside, and another 500 people waiting outside.

Loefah: I loved that this thing that started with us fucking about had gone international, and the kids loved it. We had a big guest list, and a special international queue to make sure they could all get in. Every DMZ, there would be at least 10 or 15, and sometimes up to 40 or 50 international people coming for the weekend. We thought they were mad, but once we started playing in other countries, we saw it wasn’t just a handful of people – there were whole scenes around this. Some of those people ended up being DJs, producers or promoters.

Mala: I remember when certain basslines of ours would roll out; it would be almost like a delayed reaction in the dance. The time it would take for the low frequency to go through someone’s body, you would almost hear the audience, the further you go back in the dance, responding at a slight delay from each other; as the bass wave is going through people. You’d get this kind of … raw coming-up.

I don’t know how to explain it exactly, but when I’d go and listen to [dub sound system] Jah Shaka, I saw that this non-aggressive way of presenting music to an audience allows the audience to be themselves with it. And because the music is so deeply drenched in messages, both worldly and otherworldly, you exist in those places simultaneously for those moments that you allow yourself to be. I always thought that that was escapism, but it’s not – that’s actually living. So for me to play and make music the way I do, I am aiming to have no worries, no wants, no needs, no desires, where everything is harmonious, without conflict. If that’s how we live in the dance, maybe we can live like that in the world, too.

Nina Simone said that the role of the artist is to tell the story of the times, and I’ve very much tried to tell a story of our times through instrumental records. I’ve always hoped my beats make people, for a moment, become able to forget not who they are, but everything they think they are. The dance presents a wonderful opportunity to allow ourselves to just be.