A now-sound in those parts of London still haunted
by the ghosts of old jungle and drum 'n' bass, dubstep sounds like a musical
mode made for a ravey sort of wake. Dubstep artists on the Skull Disco label's
two-disc compilation Soundboy Punishments favor sparseness over density, homing in on
isolated drum sounds and letting suggestion take over from there: On "Girder,"
the producer known as Appleblim crams lots of little taps and reverberations
into a soundscape marked by reedy breaths blown back from old Jamaican dub
reggae, but the dominant factor remains its expansive sense of space. In "New
Dawn," Shackleton enlists weird yelps and breaches of noise in what starts out
like a dream but moves into the realm of nightmare. A revealing highlight of
the set comes by way of Ricardo Villalobos, a techno artist whose chilling
20-minute remix of Shackleton's "Blood On My Hands" meditates on the paralysis
and action latent in a sound that traffics in a choked-up language of heaves
and sighs.