Babe Rainbow - Shaved EP (Warp)

Being relatively new, the vocabulary of dubstep and its many sprawling relatives is still fairly sketchy. Depending on your outlook this is either an immovable roadblock or a great creative opportunity – in a style that has yet to grow out of adolescence, that is unburdened by rules, that is fumbling around in the dark even, then surely the descriptive writing should reflect this. Any creative work which hovers around the avant garde is the same of course, it’s just that dubstep has opened up creative potential so drastically. Like the invention of a new piece of technology, producers have been let loose on a whole new lexicon of sounds, Cameron Reed’s Babe Rainbow finding its natural home at Warp with the release of Shaved EP.

Needless to say, the Vancouver producer is at the deeper, darker end of the spectrum, with a sedate line in fuggy, introspective pieces. Creeping around the peripheries of barely sentient consciousnesses, Shaved EP is in some ways a lot closer to dubstep’s hazy beginnings than one might expect. Low industrial humming is punctured with typical sparseness with that mainstay, the reverberating high hat smack. Where UK scenes have languished in the strangeness of their urban sprawl, Shaved staggers lost, in a placeless territory, picking up its hooks where needs be.

As a Warp release easy comparisons point to label mate Flying Lotus, whose experimentalism is loosely tethered to underground hip-hop rather than dubstep. Using this as the rough starting point, this EP certainly doesn’t get entangled in any stylistic rules. If Burial’s Untrue was the definitive soundtrack to the late-night reality of London, than Babe Rainbow charts the unreality of dreams and the imagination, with all the enchantment, confusion and disturbed imagery that accompany this.

By Finn Scott-Delany