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Aftershock: The Seismic Impact of Dubstep
Not yet published
Expected 25 Aug 26An oral history tracing dubstep's rise from London underground to global phenomenon.
At the cusp of a new millennium, British electronic music was rapidly changing. Jungle and garage had broken into the mainstream, but were running out of creative gas – what fresh movement would next captivate the underground? On the outer edges of London, a small group of bass lovers had the answer. Through a new strain of subloaded beats that stripped jungle, rave, techno and garage for parts, this scene returned to the dub roots, prizing the fundamentals of soundsystem culture: bass, space and togetherness. They called it dubstep.
In Aftershock: The Seismic Impact of Dubstep, seasoned music writer Lauren Martin charts the origins of one of the 21st century’s most innovative music genres in an oral history format. Through the testimonies of its architects and an immersive array of photography, flyers and unseen scene history, Aftershock chronicles the rise of artists like Skream, Mala, Coki, Loefah, Horsepower Productions and Rusko, as well as labels and parties such as Hyperdub, Tempa, DMZ, FWD>> and Skull Disco.
Together, this movement shook the British underground, exploded onto the internet, and, within a decade, had rocked global music at unprecedented scale. Through first-hand storytelling, Aftershock is a testament to how the imagination and persistence of a few can transform culture.
At the cusp of a new millennium, British electronic music was rapidly changing. Jungle and garage had broken into the mainstream, but were running out of creative gas – what fresh movement would next captivate the underground? On the outer edges of London, a small group of bass lovers had the answer. Through a new strain of subloaded beats that stripped jungle, rave, techno and garage for parts, this scene returned to the dub roots, prizing the fundamentals of soundsystem culture: bass, space and togetherness. They called it dubstep.
In Aftershock: The Seismic Impact of Dubstep, seasoned music writer Lauren Martin charts the origins of one of the 21st century’s most innovative music genres in an oral history format. Through the testimonies of its architects and an immersive array of photography, flyers and unseen scene history, Aftershock chronicles the rise of artists like Skream, Mala, Coki, Loefah, Horsepower Productions and Rusko, as well as labels and parties such as Hyperdub, Tempa, DMZ, FWD>> and Skull Disco.
Together, this movement shook the British underground, exploded onto the internet, and, within a decade, had rocked global music at unprecedented scale. Through first-hand storytelling, Aftershock is a testament to how the imagination and persistence of a few can transform culture.
304 pages, Hardcover
Expected publication August 25, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
Review of advance copy
The internet is very bad at making visible that which has been lost. In an endless sea of archives, it's easy for pop culture to slip through the cracks, and when everybody present assumes everyone else in attendance is keeping notes it's hard to remember that, actually, someone needs to write these things down!
This is a role that Lauren Martin has, thankfully, taken on. After the release of Vice's Oral History of Dubstep (https://www.vice.com/en/article/an-or...) in 2015 felt like a definitive document of what had gone before, that material is here expanded upon 10 years after the original article, and two decades after the actual events.
Oral histories carry a risk of feeling unfocussed or poorly organised, after all there's only so much you can do about the flow of threads between interviews, or the fact that your subjects recollections are vague, or don't fit into an easy narrative. Fortunately, Martin's skill as interviewer and editor smooth out all the rough edges and result in a book that could have been through-written.
Whether it comes down to her assembling the right groups of subjects (I've no idea the extent to which these interviews were pre-arranged vs. simply who was there), asking the right questions, or simply a masterful command of the edit, Martin manages to bring this together in a way that feels at once immediate and nostalgic.
Music and culture work in cycles of self-reference, and whether it's the timing that lends this book an aspect of being simultaneously prophetic and stuck in the past, not that the latter is anything but expected for an oral history. Here we have a book talking about a movement that, within the book's specific terms, ended a decade and a half ago, and yet there's a feeling in the later interviews that maybe it's not quite done yet.
This is a role that Lauren Martin has, thankfully, taken on. After the release of Vice's Oral History of Dubstep (https://www.vice.com/en/article/an-or...) in 2015 felt like a definitive document of what had gone before, that material is here expanded upon 10 years after the original article, and two decades after the actual events.
Oral histories carry a risk of feeling unfocussed or poorly organised, after all there's only so much you can do about the flow of threads between interviews, or the fact that your subjects recollections are vague, or don't fit into an easy narrative. Fortunately, Martin's skill as interviewer and editor smooth out all the rough edges and result in a book that could have been through-written.
Whether it comes down to her assembling the right groups of subjects (I've no idea the extent to which these interviews were pre-arranged vs. simply who was there), asking the right questions, or simply a masterful command of the edit, Martin manages to bring this together in a way that feels at once immediate and nostalgic.
Music and culture work in cycles of self-reference, and whether it's the timing that lends this book an aspect of being simultaneously prophetic and stuck in the past, not that the latter is anything but expected for an oral history. Here we have a book talking about a movement that, within the book's specific terms, ended a decade and a half ago, and yet there's a feeling in the later interviews that maybe it's not quite done yet.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Great storytelling, composed of interviews and edited in into a compelling narrative arc. Heroes are fed up with the way thighs are, they create their own world, which inevitably falls apart, once it grows out of their hands. I almost forgot that story. A super-niche genre of dance music from London, emerging from a closed circle of friends and (pot)heads. They’ve been meeting in one particular vinyl store in Croydon, playing tunes on a heavy soundsystem in a small club in Shoreditch, making beats to out-do each other, trading them on CDs and curating by pressing duplates. Bored of the overproduced drum’n’bass sound and the UK garage posh. I’ve been observing it from 2004 from close distance, almost in realtime. Recordings of pirate radio shows, blog posts picking the signals of the future made me as close as I could ever be to a scene in the making. Quite soon we hosted our own dubstep parties in Bratislava. Even though I knew the main story of it, the book goes into detail not only in the minutiae (who what when where). You get to appreciate how the sound has been built on top of the preceding generarions (Joker visits to the Roni Size studio in Bristol), how diverse and colorful the sound was (purple sound), or how the physics of bass operate. This is a story that reads even better from the distance of 20 years, at a time when more of us seem to look out for the future, again.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Fascinating history of the origins and development of the dubstep scene, by the author of the classic oral history for Vice. This music was hugely influential for me, even though I only cottoned on once things had started to implode in the early 2010s.
Along with grime, it was the last major UK scene rooted in a thriving physical-social infrastructure of record shops, pirate radio, dubplates, and labels. In its initial phases the Internet is an asset, helping spread the word about the scene and giving it roots to spread outside of London without much mainstream radio backing. But the Internet soon became advanced enough to undermine the aforementioned physical infrastructure that helped birth the scene. File sharing gutted record shops’ ability to make money, and the accelerating spread of the culture made it hard to retain any local identity.
The oral history format works well: it’s a snappy read that gives you a good sense of the personalities involved, and lets you see divergent takes from key players without much editorialising from the author. There’s just the right amount of bitchiness and gossip too.
The book is gorgeously designed, packed with photos and rave ephemera — flyers with wild graphic design that give a real, concrete sense of the different aesthetic projects the key players were pursuing. There are some funny details too, like the dress codes for dark garage raves generously allowing jeans and trainers, but never tracksuits.
I could read about this stuff all day, so there were plenty of angles I’d have liked explored further: the disintegration of the garage scene that birthed dubstep, and the disintegration of the UK dubstep scene itself (I reckon there’s a whole book in that alone).
The gender politics would be worth digging into — it was a heavily male scene, and more women’s voices would have helped. Sarah Lockhart stands out as a pivotal figure who’d have been fascinating to hear from (apparently she did not want to appear). It might also have been good to hear from more peripheral figures — not just DJs and producers, but the business side, graphic designers, photographers, and others on the scene’s edges.
These are all intended as mild criticisms - great book!
Along with grime, it was the last major UK scene rooted in a thriving physical-social infrastructure of record shops, pirate radio, dubplates, and labels. In its initial phases the Internet is an asset, helping spread the word about the scene and giving it roots to spread outside of London without much mainstream radio backing. But the Internet soon became advanced enough to undermine the aforementioned physical infrastructure that helped birth the scene. File sharing gutted record shops’ ability to make money, and the accelerating spread of the culture made it hard to retain any local identity.
The oral history format works well: it’s a snappy read that gives you a good sense of the personalities involved, and lets you see divergent takes from key players without much editorialising from the author. There’s just the right amount of bitchiness and gossip too.
The book is gorgeously designed, packed with photos and rave ephemera — flyers with wild graphic design that give a real, concrete sense of the different aesthetic projects the key players were pursuing. There are some funny details too, like the dress codes for dark garage raves generously allowing jeans and trainers, but never tracksuits.
I could read about this stuff all day, so there were plenty of angles I’d have liked explored further: the disintegration of the garage scene that birthed dubstep, and the disintegration of the UK dubstep scene itself (I reckon there’s a whole book in that alone).
The gender politics would be worth digging into — it was a heavily male scene, and more women’s voices would have helped. Sarah Lockhart stands out as a pivotal figure who’d have been fascinating to hear from (apparently she did not want to appear). It might also have been good to hear from more peripheral figures — not just DJs and producers, but the business side, graphic designers, photographers, and others on the scene’s edges.
These are all intended as mild criticisms - great book!
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews