The Kurdish tricolor drawn by a young boy All photos courtesy of Olivia Kortas.

This article originally appeared on VICE Germany

For a recent college project, Olivia Kortas spent three weeks in various refugee camps on the Turkish-Syrian border. The political journalism student wanted to write about the hopes, future plans, and everyday lives of Kurdish refugees. The children who lived in the camps had been there for so long they didn't even want to return to their hometown, Kobane. The camps were all they knew. In order to see things through their perspective, she asked them to draw some pictures of how they were feeling.

We sat her down to ask about the project.

VICE: How did end up working around the Syrian border? Had you dealt with the Islamic State as a topic before leaving?
Olivia Kortas: I actually spent a long time researching IS propaganda in Europe for an article I was writing. I follow all the latest developments, too, of course. This project wasn't so much about IS, though—it was more focused on the Kurds. Many of the camps were organized by Kurdish groups. I wanted to write about what life was like for the people that had been there for nine months. I wanted to see what their daily life was like and what future plans they had. I was interested in knowing how different Kurdish groups help these people. I was actually writing about the parliamentary elections that happened in Turkey on June 7, too. The campaign trail was especially emotional in the Kurdish areas. A lot of people were hoping that the pro-Kurdish HDP would win seats.

So how is daily life in the camps?
There are several different refugee camps and everyday life is quite different depending on which one of them you live in. Refugees who have lost a lot of family members live in slightly more comfortable camps known as "container camps." The mood in those camps is a bit calmer because people aren't even considering returning home.

I spent a long time in a camp that was only a couple of miles from Kobane. People were more tense there—they seemed very unsettled. There's only about 120 of the original 900 tents left standing. People are heading back to Kobane in droves.

In general, things follow a routine in the camps. Breakfast is distributed in the morning—bread, olives, and sometimes a bit of cheese. Children are in charge of cleaning the toilet facilities and collecting trash on the camp pathways.

A small group of refugees cook lunch for the entire camp. Dinner usually consists of bean soup, salad, and bread. Folks tend to take shelter from the heat by spending the afternoons in their tents. The camp, made entirely from tents, is about seven miles from the closest village, Suruc. There isn't a lot for the people do there, really. A volunteer teacher from Suruc comes two or three times a week to teach the Latin alphabet, as well as Turkish and Kurdish. Some of the refugees work for local farmers and earn a bit of money in that way. More or less everybody is just preparing to head back to Kobane, though.

How did the kids feel about being in the camp?
A lot of the kids in the camp act very grown-up. They're very independent. They cook, clean, take down tents and help the camp workers wherever they can. The younger children are very playful and lively. They craft kites out of plastic bags and the weeds growing around the watering holes. Some of the children would actually rather stay in the camp than go back to Kobane. There's nothing waiting for them there other than the ruins of their houses.

The relationship they have with their parents in Kobane is different to the one they have here in the camps. The parents have different interests back home—they don't care about things like games or drawings. They're more proud of the children when they sing about Kobane or YPG and YPJ's struggle.

Watch: PKK Youth - Fighting for Kurdish Neighborhoods:

The children attended art class, right?
Yeah. An international aid worker gave the children some crayons and a few pieces of paper. It was right about when I arrived at the camp. A worker asked if I could look after the children for a few hours. I just supervised them and let them draw whatever they wanted. The whole thing happened in a gray tent with ten wooden benches and 20 chairs packed into it. A few of the young children began drawing furiously. They were all screaming for three colors—red, green, and yellow. There was only one of each in the communal pack that the Romanian aid worker had brought.

So the drawings ended up being really similar?
Most of the kids wanted to draw with those colors, yeah. They're the Kurdish colors, the colors of their homeland. They're the colors of the fighters that liberated Kobane. The drawings were almost entirely political. It was as if the kids were competing to see who could fill up the sheets of paper the quickest. They had a lot of fun—they were all so proud.

Scroll down to see the drawings.

An airplane with the YPG flag and the Kurdish colors.

The only picture completely drawn in blue. In the background you can see houses and, in the middle, an explosion.

Nine-year-old Nesrin told us that this was his home, Kobane.

Rojova is the name of the Kurdish region in northern Syria. The YPG is one of the armed Kurdish forces in Syria, as is the exclusively female YPJ. The PKK is the Kurdistan Workers' Party, which is on many worldwide terrorist lists.

Kobane is written in Arabic in the middle of the heart. The elephant in the right corner is holding a YPG flag.

A yellow triangle with a red star: the YPG flag. The children in the camp often sing about the how the militia liberated their home, Kobane.

Some of the kids didn't draw political symbols or flags but they only used Kurdish colors.

The children have been living in tents for more than nine months. Some of them drew their houses, here with a black hole in the entry.

Ciwan drew a bridge with a dove sitting at the end.

The youngest children (four years old) drew hearts in the Kurdish colors.

A red star on a green triangle is the flag of the Kurdish women's militia.

A tree grows out of a rainbow in Kurdish colors—Abdullah Öcalan's nickname, Apo, is above and beneath it. The PKK leader has been imprisoned on the island of Imrali for 16 years.

Image via Flickr user PhotoAtelier

A family in New Jersey is allegedly being scared shitless by a stalker who calls himself "The Watcher" and is obsessed with the family's new home, ABC News reports. The Watcher has been after the family for the past year, ever since they purchased their new six-bedroom, $1.3 million home. Three days after purchasing the house, the family began receiving regular letters from The Watcher.

"Why are you here? I will find out," one says. "My grandfather watched the house in the 1920s and my father watched in the 1960s. It is now my time."

"Have they found what is in the walls yet?" another letter continues. "In time they will. I am pleased to know your names and the names now of the young blood you have brought to me."

The family is filing a "what-the-fuck" lawsuit against the couple who sold them the house, claiming the previous owners knew about the stalker but were so desperate to escape his weird domain that they forgot to mention anything about the letters.

The family still hasn't moved into the million-dollar house, and doesn't plan to. They also can't sell the house because The Watcher is watching it, and now everybody in Westfield knows.

"All of the windows and doors in [the house] allow me to watch you and track you as you move through the house," The Watcher writes in another letter. "...Will the young bloods play in the basement. Who has the rooms facing the street? I'll know as soon as you move in. It will help me to know who is in which bedroom then I can plan better."

Until their lawsuit is taken care of, the family will have The Watcher on their hands. In the meantime, they might as well blog about it . Can you really be that scared of a guy who calls children "young bloods" and takes his pseudonym from Dr. Dre?

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The crowd at DMZ, one of the dubstep scene's two most iconic club nights, along with FWD>>

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

My relationship with dubstep dates back about a decade. I left school in Glasgow in 2005 and thought I'd go to university, but was too busy drinking cider in the park to decide what to study, or where. I'd often end up at hardcore shows, but eventually got bored of what they had to offer. Then I discovered clubbing. I was living in an entirely different country from the one that I felt was spawning everything new and exciting in British dance music at the time, but sneaking into parties underage, I was able to hear some of the DJs who were playing at the London nights I desperately wanted to go to: FWD>> at Plastic People, and DMZ at Mass.

Around that time, I got a job in the budget music shop Fopp. "Let us buy some of this music," an employee and I asked. "You can have five CDs, OK?" they replied. "Then, if they sell, we'll see." We ordered Skream's debut album, the first Tectonic Plates compilation, Burial's debut album, Dubstep Allstars Vol. 4, mixed by DJs Hatcha and Youngsta, and the Mary Anne Hobbs-curated Warrior Dubz compilation. They sold out almost immediately. Hundreds of miles away from the epicenter of this sound, there was an appetite for it—my own almost aggressive in its confidence. This is the most fucking incredible thing I have ever heard, I would think, and still do.

UK club music is a conflation of sounds and cultures that feel gargantuan in their legacies: reggae, dub, jungle, garage, drum and bass, house and techno. By the turn of the millennium, some of these genres were standing strong, while some were crumbling under the weight of their own mediocrity and ego—and it was this stagnation that bred something shocking and unique. In the late 90s and early 2000s, a crew of friends from south London decided that, fuck it, they'd had enough of these legacies; loved them, yes, but for their history rather than their sense of urgency. Now, they were going to do their own thing.

These friends went on to create a sound that changed electronic music. Dubstep is nearly, roughly, 15 years old this year (and with the sold-out DMZ party's 10th birthday in south London next month, it feels more loved than ever), so the summer of 2015 seems like a fitting time to tell its story. This is not an encyclopedia of a genre; that will come, I'm sure. This is a story of a sound and culture, told by some of those who built it, and it's dedicated to the memory and work of Stephen Samuel Gordon, AKA Spaceape. Rest in peace.

Intro and interviews: Lauren Martin / Photos by Georgina Cook.

CHAPTER ONE: "There's a Reason It All Came from Croydon"

Croydon. Photo by Peter Bright via

CHAPTER BIOS:

Mala: One of the founding members of the London-based DMZ club night and label, he's also one half of the production duo Digital Mystikz, along with Coki, as well as a solo DJ and producer.
Loefah: A producer, DJ and one of the core members of the DMZ club night and label, he also runs the Swamp81 label.
Sgt Pokes: The main MC for the DMZ club nights, Sgt Pokes has MC'd dubstep parties for over 15 years.

MALA: I remember growing up and thinking that the sky was grey, the streets were grey, and the buildings were grey. On the weekends, we'd have teams play on pitches, at the back of this so-called "lake" that you could literally walk across. They called it the "country park" but the council didn't bother with the upkeep and it just became a place to set fire to old bunkers. There really wasn't much going on.

LOEFAH: There's a reason it all came from Croydon. Croydon was just an incestuous town, with people just working, drinking, thieving, and getting fucked. I used to go out to hardcore raves, and then split off into jungle and drum and bass, but drum and bass became homogenized with the "liquid" sound and then suddenly, garage happened. Before the summer holidays in 1997, everyone was into jungle. After the holidays, everyone was into garage. It was that quick.

Are you into dance music? Check out Thump, our entire website dedicated to the stuff.

MALA: Myself, Coki and Pokes were at school together. We played at house parties in the mid 90s, and we met Loefah at around 15 years old through mutual friends. He was the junglist who was into [seminal drum and bass label] Metalheadz, just like us.

SGT POKES: My dad even worked with Mala's dad, and went to school with Coki's dad. Around 2000-01, I was managing a bar in Croydon called The Black Sheep, where I was also MCing drum and bass nights. Mala was an MC, too; playing garage nights like Twice As Nice under the name Malibu. If you do the math, of who Digital Mystikz are now: Mala and Coki? One was Malibu, and the other was Coke. Mala actually made a track with an MC called Onyx Stone, who was his MC partner at Twice As Nice, called "Whadda We Like?"—which came out on Cooltempo in about 2001, I think. I think that, maybe, Mala saw a side of the music industry after that period that made him react so aversely; to be the anti-commercial vibe he's been for years, you know?

LOEFAH: We all started writing bassline music at around 138BPM, then meeting up on Fridays and playing them to each other. Since we grew up around soundsystems, the sound was all about the bottom end, but we had our own vibes: Mala had his broken dub house, Coki was more ragga and dancehall, and I was trying to re-invent jungle in my head, because I just couldn't understand why it wasn't working.

Then, we met [key figure in developing the dubstep sound and Big Apple record shop employee] Hatcha. He gave Mala and I a lift home one night after a rave, in the April or May of 2003, and there was a CD of Mala, Coki, and my own beats in the car. Hatcha heard them and said, "I could play these at [vital East London dubstep and grime night] FWD>>." We were like, "What's FWD>>?" The first time we went to FWD>> he played "Chamber," "Pathwaysm" and "Mawo Dub." From then on, we were proper hooked.

I know that Sub FM was there, but that was more of an up-and-coming thing then, so if you had access to Rinse, Rinse was it. Mala used to come round to mine when Hatcha and Youngsta were on air, park his car in a street in South Norwood and pick up a signal by the Crystal Palace tower. It was such a dodgy reception—and the heating in his car didn't work either, so it was fucking freezing—but we'd just sit in our car for hours, sparking zoots and listening to Rinse.

SGT POKES: Mala called me and said, "I've written some tracks. Hatcha's cut some of mine, some of Coki's"—around the time of "Indian Dub," "Pathways," "Mawo Dub," "Hurricane Kick," "Fire Elements," and DMZ001, long before it was on dubplate. It was some of the aggiest fucking stuff I'd ever heard. I wanted to hear it in a club so badly. I'd been to FWD>> before, and knew that I could bun and chat in there, but I went down to hear my friends' tunes after that—and it was just their music, all night.

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CHAPTER TWO: "These records, they were mongrels of garage."

Youngsta at DMZ

CHAPTER BIOS:

Martin Clark: A London-based journalist and DJ who has worked for a variety of UK publications and now runs the Keysound label and club night.
Youngsta: Widely recognized as one of dubstep's key DJs.
Kode9: Scottish-born, London-based producer and DJ, who founded and continues to run the Hyperdub label.
Oris Jay: Also known as Darqwuan, the Sheffield-based producer and DJ helped to lead the breaks element of the dubstep sound.

MARTIN CLARK: Around 2000, I came across a few records that hinted at something different. As garage was disintegrating, there were people who wanted to keep it dark, and still MC-focused, but these records, they were the mongrels of garage: creative and prolific, in their own dark, weird corner. I was working at The Face at the time, and they asked me to organize a garage photo-shoot in Croydon in the Easter of 2000, so I met [producers whose music bridged the gap, chronologically and/or stylistically, between garage and dubstep] J Da Flex, Zed Bias, and El-B.

The garage heads were adamant that this music wasn't garage, but that was the point. El-B had a real topography of a style, in the warmth and darkness of his instrumentalism. It was all hidden in the signal and noise of poppy garage at first, but then it became obvious that they needed to concentrate it into one or two places to find its feet. That was when [FWD>> founder and Rinse FM station manager] Sarah "Soulja" Lockhart and Neil Joliffe, who ran Tempa and Shelflife, formed a company called Ammunition, around 2000-01.

YOUNGSTA: I saw a shift when DJ Zinc's "138 Trek" was released in 2000, and was getting played by all the massive garage DJs. For me, it was all down to my sister, Sarah ["Soulja" Lockhart]. She got me onto Freek FM. I remember being 13-years-old when I got my first 2-4 AM slot. Sarah even took me to Freek FM every Saturday, because I was too young to go by myself. She was also supplying me with tunes because of her work: for a distributor, then at a record shop where the Vibe bar used to be, and then at Black Market in Soho. I'd get all the test pressings early through her and when she started Ammunition with Neil Joliffe, I was getting all of the promos, too.

When she made the move around 2000 to start the label and FWD>>, it was to release this, well, really strange music. 2000-01 was a fucking mixed up time. Even Hatcha was playing Eskimo. We were both doing our own thing—I came from Freek FM, he came from UpFront FM—but even though we both ended up on the garage circuit, the only times we played together then were if we were both at FWD>>, after Sarah asked me to be a resident.

KODE9: Hyperdub started in 2001 as a web magazine, but we also did a few events in the early days before becoming a label. We did one at The Bug Bar in Brixton, with myself, Actress and Gavin [Weale], who was running Werk Discs and doing some writing for Hyperdub. In 2002, myself, Actress and [music writer and theorist] Mark Fisher were at the ICA, presenting spoken word, performances and [seminal Afrofuturism documentary film] The Last Angel of History.

In 2003, we did a launch for a philosophy book about bacteria written by Luciana, the wife of [late poet and MC] Spaceape, with Spaceape doing readings from the book sound-tracked by lots of bass. That was also the first night we had copies of "Sine of the Dub/Stalker," I believe.

Between 2001-03 I was writing about this darker garage stuff, like El-B, Horsepower Productions and Oris Jay, and Ammunition were running a website called dubplate.net, streaming dubplates months, if not years, before they came out. Because I was writing about all of these artists on Hyperdub, I ended up running dubplate.net for Ammunition.

ORIS JAY: One day, I was sitting in the office with Sarah Lockhart, Martin Clark, and Neil Joliffe, and we were talking about [the DJ and producer] Benny Ill, and a magazine feature that was due. "It's like 2-step, but it's got dub in it. It's kind of like... dubstep." At that point we were like, "Yeah, yeah: it's bass-driven, the beats are steppier. Why don't we just call it dubstep?"

KODE 9: I do remember there being a front cover of XLR8R with the word "dubstep." I wrote a short article called "Yardcore" for that issue, too, as an attempt to talk about the Jamaican influence on garage, grime, and dubstep; as a splicing of soundsystem culture and hardcore.

The name made sense, though. Basically, there were three aspects of dub that influenced dubstep. The most important was playing the instrumental versions of vocal garage tracks, which was a little like what dub was to reggae—the instrumental of a full vocal. El-B pushed the release of those instrumentals: trying to bring the moodiness from early Metalheadz into garage, and so on.

"It's like 2-step, but it's got dub in it. It's kind of like... dubstep"

The second was dub as a methodology, which, for me, is apparent in all dance music: manipulating sound to create impossible sonic spaces using reverb, echo, and such. The third is the influence of the genre called dub. (It became a cliché actually, through sampling old Jamaican films and soundtracks, and adding vocal samples.) All of that, along with soundsystem culture, were the elemental influences of early dubstep.

The sound needed a hub to grow, and that hub was Big Apple. I remember when I went into the shop for the first time. I was supposed to interview Benga, and Hatcha and Artwork and Danny from DND were hanging out the window with a catapult and rolls of wet toilet paper, firing at people in the market. They haven't changed.

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CHAPTER THREE: "Rahhhh, I like this, but what the fuck is it?"

Skream at Fwd>>

CHAPTER BIOS:

Artwork: Something of a father figure to a number of younger dubstep DJs, Artwork is a producer, DJ, engineer, and one third of Magnetic Man, along with Skream and Benga.
Benny Ill: DJ, engineer, and one half of seminal production and DJ duo Horsepower Productions.
Joe Nice: Baltimore, Maryland-based DJ who started the first dubstep party in America, Dub War.
Coki: One half of Digital Mystikz, along with Mala, Coki is one of the core members of the DMZ label and club night.
Skream: Croydon-born producer and DJ who was picked up as the so-called teenage poster boy of the dubstep scene.
Chef: A dub cutter and engineer at Croydon's Transition Studios, he was also one of the early core DJs of the dubstep scene, joining Skream and Benga's Smooth Criminals crew as a teenager.

ARTWORK: Big Apple was a record shop in Croydon that started out selling techno and tech house. There was a floor for drum and bass and jungle upstairs, where Skream's brother Hijak and DJ Bailey, who's now a DJ on BBC Radio 1, used to work. Because I was their mate, I would hang out on that floor all day, waiting for new records to come in. There was a recording studio upstairs and after a few years the shop owner, John Kennedy, said, "Do you want to move into this studio? You can have it." I started making beats—sort of at the tail end of drum and bass, but also messing around with techno—but it was a haze because everyone was so fucking stoned all the time.

By the time I was making techno as Grain, garage had started to creep into the shop. I was so into the US stuff, like Masters at Work, but walking downstairs and hearing the UK stuff, too, I decided to put garage vocals into the techno. Once I started making garage as Menta with Danny Harrison, who I was also engineering music for, it had got to a point where you'd see that we had three or four white labels on the wall at any one time, under five or six different names. We were sometimes doing 5,000 to 10,000 of our white labels then, easily.

If you ask me what the turning point in that shop was, it was Benny Ill. I made a record that came out on Decay Records: a weird label run by this nutty guy called Heidi from Switzerland, based out of a flat in Streatham. John and I went and made this record with him, and Benny Ill was the engineer. He knew how to use the room and desk, he had a TR-909 drum machine—and he was phenomenal. We'd ask him to help us mix the record and he'd walk in, look at it, and turn everything down. Turn the hi-hat up, light a joint and slightly turn a frequency that you couldn't hear; sit back, make a cup of tea, then get a compressor out... You'd think: 'What the fuck is he doing?'

One day he knocked on our studio door and said, "Awrite Arthur mate, I've been making some garage. Can you have a listen?" And he played this fucked up stuff. We said, "Benny, your beats are all... on the wrong fucking beat, mate": samples from films, in with this dubby, weird bass. He said, "What do you think I should do?" I didn't know, did I, but Hatcha said, "This is fucking great, I'm going to play this." I remember when Benny had a remix of Elephant Man "Log On" and—fuck me—I'd never seen anything go off like that track at FWD>>.

BENNY ILL: When Hijak and Arthur had the studio, it was a really sociable set-up—not always to the pleasure of management, mind you. I remember Chef used to come down on his moped with a soundsystem on the back. He'd park it outside, and people would be hanging around and listening to records. I'd taken some tapes down to Big Apple for the owner, John, and this fella Neil Joliffe, who worked for a distributor that supplied to the shop, to listen to. John told me to give the tracks to Neil because he was dealing with a lot of garage stuff that we liked—labels like Public Demand, Allstar, Acetate—and was in a position of knowledge for distributors and pressing plants. One thing lead to another, and Neil ended up creating [record label] Tempa out of Ammunition for us, as Horsepower Productions.

ARTWORK: Hatcha came into the shop when he couldn't see over the counter. He just wanted to DJ. He got decks and got really good, really fucking fast, and he had brilliant taste. He was also phenomenal at selling records—even the absolute dog-shit ones. If someone came in, he could turn it up loud and give "the Hatcha nod"—and then they'd get home with their haul and think, 'The fuck have I bought this for?' He was also totally fucking lazy, though. There was a weird relationship with him and John because he was brilliant, but didn't like to work. He just wanted to play records.

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JOE NICE: I don't think people realize the salesman and showman Hatcha actually is. He had a way of making you buy a record that you may not have necessarily wanted when you went in. What do you do, tell him, "Nah man, I've got 20 quid and I want to eat dinner tonight?" He had a way of making the bass pulsate in the store. You couldn't have it too loud, because there were people buying flowers and fruit outside and shit, but at the same time it was a very cosy and personable experience. I mean, where else was I going to buy Big Apple 005?

COKI: In 2003, I was playing a couple of tracks I'd made to Mala, and he told me to take them to Hatcha at Big Apple. I was like, "Who? What do you mean?" "They're looking for that type of sound down there," he said. When I walked in I saw this little guy behind the counter and—honestly? I was apprehensive. There was a lot of shit going on around in the ghetto. We were kids, doing stupid things, and he knew my younger cousin was in jail, so I think they thought I was trouble. When I told him I was there to show him some music, he was like, "Really?" "Yeah bruv!" "Oh, nice. Bring it in, then!" We started vibing from there.

I was never a person that went out and listened to a lot of music, so it wasn't till Hatcha was playing me Skream and Benga bits in the shop that the sound started to fit in my head. "The Judgement" really caught my ear: the way they used the bass, the filters; how the groove was laid back but still on this happy, bouncing vibe. I was like, 'Rahhhh, I like this, but what the fuck is it?'

SKREAM: I was helping out in Big Apple when I was about 14 years old—I should lie and say that I was just working there on the weekends, but I was in there every day. I used to sit in the back of Benny's studio most evenings, too. My mom thought it was a bit strange, that I was going to this guy's house to sit and watch him make music. I used to be stoned most of the time, but so was Benny. I found it amazing to watch him work—he was using Cubase on an old Atari, for fuck's sake. I'd never seen anything like it. I'd watch him make these tunes, then go out to FWD>> to hear what he'd been making, go back to mine, and try to make my own tunes all night.

Benga was friends with my older brother, and I was a friend with Benga's older brother, Flash; through girls and hanging out in Croydon. I was working in Big Apple on a Sunday, and Benga's big brother came in and said, "My brother makes music," and we ended up speaking on the phone before we met, playing each other tunes down the phone. Back then I made tunes in batches: I'd get an idea rolling and as soon as I got bored, I'd start another one. I'd take all those ideas down to Hatcha, and he'd pick which ones he wanted me to finish.

ARTWORK: Oli [Jones AKA Skream] and Benny [Adejumo AKA Benga] were coming into the shop every week with Minidiscs of their tunes, and within a year they'd gone from complete rubbish—with the kicks too loud, blowing the speakers—to making records on Music 2000 and Fruity Loops that... I've got 10 grand's worth of studio upstairs, and I couldn't make a mix that sounded that good. They'd knock out six records a day; basic as fuck loops with a 16-bar intro before the drop. If they wanted tracks for that weekend, they'd just go and cut them as they were, because they weren't going to play them for more than 32 bars. You don't need to make a seven-minute epic when you only ever play the first minute.

"I was young, and gassed, so I rolled up to a party on my moped with my tunes one night when I was 16-years-old, and went back-to-back with Benga—and we fucking smashed it up." – Chef

CHEF: I used to hear about this boy called Benga. People were like, "Yeah, this kid Benga, he's the boy wonder. He's 13-years-old and he mixes like EZ." I was like; "I'll see it when I believe it." My mate had a UKG crew that I DJ'd with, and he said that I should do a clash with Smooth Criminals, which was Benga and Skream. I bumped into them at a house party and Artwork came up to me and said, "I've heard about you, Chef. A lot of people are rating you." I was young, and gassed, so I rolled up to a party on my moped with my tunes one night when I was 16, and went back to back with Benga—and we fucking smashed it up. We ended up playing together everywhere—in snooker clubs, house parties—after that.

SKREAM: We'd just turn up and take over at these parties, like fucking bass vigilantes. They'd book one of us, and 15 of us would turn up. There was a place called Bar Rendezvous, and I made a bootleg of Cleptomaniac's "All I Do" for a party there. It was a cover of the Stevie Wonder tune, but I made a bootleg of the flip, the Bump N Flex Dub; with this long intro on it, with me talking all pitched down on it. I'll never forget that.

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CHAPTER FOUR: "Bottom line: dubplates keep you in the room."

Mala at Black Sheep Bar, Croydon

CHAPTER BIOS:

Loefah: A producer, DJ and one of the core members of the DMZ club night and label, he also runs the Swamp81 label.
Joe Nice: Baltimore, Maryland-based DJ who started the first dubstep party in America, Dub War.
Chef: A dub cutter and engineer at Croydon's Transition Studios, he was also one of the early core DJs of the dubstep scene, joining Skream and Benga's Smooth Criminals crew as a teenager.
Mala: One of the founding members of the London-based DMZ club night and label, he's also one half of the production duo Digital Mystikz, along with Coki, as well as a solo DJ and producer.
Jason Goslin, AKA Jason Goz: The master engineer and dub cutter at Croydon's Transition Studios, Jason is regarded as essential to the creation of the dubstep sound.
Sgt Pokes: The main MC for the DMZ club nights, Sgt Pokes has MC'd dubstep parties for over 15 years.

LOEFAH: Transition is a cutting house based in Forest Hill, near where we lived in south London. We heard that's where Grooverider got his dubs cut, and that was enough for us, frankly, so I started going there in probably 2003. There were rules: you only paid for your own dubs if you wanted them for yourself. If Hatcha wanted one of my tracks to play out, he'd have to pay to get it cut to dub, and then that was his copy. It all depended on what rate you were on, too. I was on 25 quid for two sides of a 10-inch, 30 quid for a 12-inch. They swapped from 10-inch to 12-inch 'cause they "ran out" of 10-inch, around 2005-06, but that was a step up. Going back to 10-inch might have made us look cheap, y'know?

JOE NICE: I started pressing and stayed on 10-inch because it was less expensive but, for me, when I was playing the early Dub War parties, it was as much a visual cue as anything else. If someone sees me pull out something that doesn't look the same size from a distance, they're thinking, "Yo, is that a 10-inch? Yooo, 10-inch are dubplates. Yooo, Joe Nice has a dubplate? Oh shit—I gotta hear what this brother's gonna play." Bottom line: dubplates keep you in the room.

Jason Gosling, AKA Jason Goz, the master engineer and dub cutter at Transition Studios, London. Photo via Discogs

CHEF: I was cutting dubs at Transition, and I saw that Jason [Goz], the master engineer, was looking to bring someone in to be a trainee. I said to him straight up, "That's my job, you can take that advert down." I was cutting dubs from 17-years old—I remember my first was Skream "Bubble," with Benga "Blood" on the flip. Jason really helped get the best out of not just me, but everyone.

MALA: It was very important for me to be part of finishing a track, and that meant going to Jason: hearing the difference between my finished version and Jason's version; seeing what subtle changes in frequencies he'd adjusted, what compression or limiting he might have applied. It was, and still is, expensive, but back then it was overtime money that was paying for my dubplates, so if you're paying 30 or 40 quid for two tracks, you'd got to be damn sure that those tracks were as good as they could possibly be.

What I learned most from Jason is that certain frequencies just won't translate on vinyl—and if you roll off, roll off, and roll off the bottom end, it actually gets heavier. The one that sticks out the most is "Anti War Dub." I actually sampled that tune: there's a full song of "Anti War Dub," with verse and lyrics at a different tempo, which Coki recorded in Jamaica with [vocalist] Spen G. I time-stretched and sampled the vocal, so the version everyone knows sounds totally different from Coki's version. With my version, I remember Jason saying, "I don't need to do anything to this." I remember him saying he thought I nailed it.

LOEFAH: When I took "Twis Up" to Jason I'd been panning my bass, which is a real no-no, but I was trying to be clever and throw basslines across the club. When I gave it to Jason, he turned around in his chair and said, "We're going to have to cut this mono you know, bruv"—and I felt like such an idiot. Jason wouldn't tell you what to do, but if you asked the right questions—"How could I make my bass sound tighter?" "Would it be a good idea to compress it, or limit it?"—he'd vibes with you. And not just for the quality of the sound, either: it's the way the tracks were built. Jason would get solid bottom ends, and the hard crack of a snare out of you. Other engineers may have tried to round those elements off, to make it more of a "poppier" mixdown, but he got it.

JASON GOZ: When I started out cutting for the reggae soundsystems it used to take me forever, and there was a lot of financial commitment involved. It took me four hours to cut a dub with four tracks on it once, and my brother said, "It's taken you four hours to earn 35 quid, are you mad?" I wasn't a mastering engineer. I wasn't even a dub cutter. I'd spend six months working to get money to buy a box of dubs, which was 220 quid at the time, then cut them and go home depressed because they didn't sound good. I learned to cut by playing them myself and not liking what I heard.

It worked out for everyone in the long run, though. I was learning when dubstep was beginning to grow, and it was perfect for all of us because there weren't any rules—and by the time dubstep had come into its own, I knew the sound that I was looking for. The thing that I loved most about dubstep was the bass—and historically, engineers are scared of bass. The sound of wood vibrating is my favorite sound in the world. I used to stand in [influential bi-monthly Brixton dubstep night, run by Loefah, Mala, Coki, and Sgt Pokes] DMZ and think, 'I wonder what the foundations of this building are like?'—because the building was physically shaking.

Want to read more about dubstep and other dance music? Lucky you, we've got a whole website dedicated to it.

Towards the end of the peak of garage, I was cutting for people like Hatcha—when he was in a crew called Stonecold GX Crew, I believe—and he started bringing me this new stuff which he just referred to as "more tribal." He'd cut a few garage pieces with me and then slip that Something Else in, until gradually the focus became more and more about this Something Else. He was without a doubt the first person to bring dubstep to Transition.

There were times when I'd go out to a club, hear a track that I'd cut, then ring up the producer on the Monday and say, "I've cut it for you again." They'd be shocked—"What? Why?" "I didn't like the way it sounded," I'd tell them—and I wouldn't charge them for it again, either. If that dub is leaving Transition with my name on it, it has to be perfect. I've had so many arguments with sound engineers in nightclubs, and with other producers, too: people asking me to re-create Mala, Loefah, Coki. When DMZ blew up, it nearly gave me a nervous breakdown. I'd be getting 15, 20 calls a day while pulling a 70-hour week.

Because of that, at the time, I was always aware of the fact that if this sound got really big, I couldn't cut every dubstep record that came out—so I held the levels back. I didn't cut them too loud. I didn't make the music too un-dynamic because, physically, it needed somewhere to go. A lot of current pop is really loud, so for a given level on your hi-fi, it screams at you. An old Bob Marley track isn't as loud, though. It's dynamic: peaks and troughs, loud parts and quiet parts. That's what I mean when I say I held back, because there's only a certain point before it's no longer listenable.

Everyone came to Transition, but some really stood out. Benga was coming to me when he was 15 years old. I remember sitting there, in the studio, and I said to him, "You know what, bruv? I'm going to give you a discount. I can't believe you're saving your dinner money to cut dubs." Then there was when Kode9 came to me with Burial's music, and said, "Don't take too much time on it. He doesn't want too much processing," so I just made it presentable.

A lot of electronic music at the time was too computerized for me—quantized, even—but Burial reminded me of how Robbie from Sly and Robbie played bass. When he wants to hype it up, he'll sometimes play in front of the drum note, others on the note, sometimes behind the note—all to create mood. That's why I loved it when Kode9 brought me Burial's music: life isn't on the beat.

SGT POKES: When we turned up to play the big drum and bass raves with our boxes of dubs, Roni Size and his lot would turn up with their CD wallets, clock us, and be like, "These kids have got bags full of fucking dubplates. They're not mucking about." People used to talk about elitism and audiophilia with dubplate exclusivity, but the ability to keep a tune alive—and keep it on dubplate, white label and test pressing, for 18 months or more—was important. Like Coki's "Burnin.'" I remember hearing it a few days before a DMZ and thinking, 'This is going to smash up the place.' In the club, drop it—four pull-ups. Skream and Benny play it—two pull-ups. By the end of the night, people were still screaming for it.

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CHAPTER FIVE: "We felt that we had the right to be precious."

Loefah, Mala, and Coki at DMZ

CHAPTER BIOS:

Oris Jay: Also known as Darqwuan, the Sheffield-based producer and DJ helped to lead the breaks element of the dubstep sound.
Youngsta: Widely recognized as one of dubstep's key DJs.
Loefah: A producer, DJ and one of the core members of the DMZ club night and label, he also runs the Swamp81 label.
Martin Clark: A London-based journalist and DJ who has worked for a variety of UK publications and now runs the Keysound label and club night.

ORIS JAY: The culture of sharing tracks in the early days was a very special one. If you were in the Ammunition crew, you'd go through Sarah Lockhart. You have to imagine her as the early version of the internet for us: our "Soulja." Sarah would say, "I'm only going to give this tune to you and three other people, but I'll take your tune to this DJ and that DJ to play out." I'd give her a DAT tape, she'd take it down to the cutting house, and tell them who can get what depending on where and when they're playing.

If I wanted a Skream tune, I'd have to go from Sheffield to London, then to Croydon to meet Skream, where he'd give me a DAT tape. I'd take that tape to the cutting house, wait in the queue, and cut the dub without knowing what it'd sound like. You don't even know if it'll sound right till you played it: on the radio was cool, but it was how it sounded in FWD>>, on that soundsystem, that mattered most. Even if the dub costs 40 quid, I've probably spent double that trying to get to London, the cutting house, and back again, but you told yourself it was worth doing because when you played that dub out that night, you could be certain that no one else in the world had it.

YOUNGSTA: I know we would have to meet on road, so I'd meet Mala and Coki at Victoria station and they'd gave me dubplates that they'd cut for me. Since I was the DJ, they wanted to give it to me as a present. If they didn't give us their music, they weren't going to get released and booked, so it was in both our interests. By a certain point I was only playing tracks by maybe four or five producers—Skream, Benga, Coki, some D1 bits—but I built a very close relationship with Loefah.

I met Loefah in 2002 at a Hatcha gig at the Egg club, near Kings Cross. By that point, Mala and Loefah had given their beats to Hatcha, and had come down to the night to hear them played out. A lot of people were saying that it was too minimal; that it wasn't "worthy" of a club, but that's what we were buzzing out to. The garage slowly disappeared from my sets as Loefah progressed, and it got to the point where we were both in so deep with one another.

LOEFAH: People were getting annoyed with us. It took about a year for people to start to get a physical groove with my tracks, but that was the best thing about it: it had vague influences, but nothing overt enough that it could be grasped right away. We wanted there to be no discernible garage influence at all. We were fed up with all the skippiness. We'd had ten years of breaks, from hardcore, jungle, and drum and bass, so we started with half-step beats. I'd play tracks down the phone to Youngsta every night, and he was very critical. He'd be like, "Take that hi-hat out"; "That's too loud," telling me how to mix down over the phone.

Half-step was intricate. The backbone of it would be a kick and a snare on the half-time, so quite regular, and in between it would be this mad percussion; rattling off itself in the negative space, as a form of call and response. I see the space in between the drumbeats as just as much of an instrument as anything else in the track. From the outside it would look simple, but when you checked it, it was like, "Fucking hell, there's a lot going on in there."

"For a time, there were maybe 50 dubstep tracks in the whole world. If five of them are mine, I'm not just going to chuck them out there." – Loefah

YOUNGSTA: Loefah took it to the point where he changed the structure of the drums. Not straight syncopated 4/4. Not 2-step garage. It was about taking a break out and having as much space as possible, while still maintaining a groove. Some of it was so atmospheric that it was like a soundscape, but we didn't take it that far and that's what made it a winner. Me, I'm weird. I like things a certain way, and that was how you could make a whole new track out of a blend of two of Loefah's beats. Even if two beats are perfectly in key with each other—which they always should be, beat-matching aside—it's about the pin-point precision timing of mixing together two or three beats that are so perfectly in key, and so stripped back, that they have elements in each that the other doesn't; that when put together, they create a whole new tune.

You know how drum and bass breaks go well together because of how they're structured? And how house has a 4/4 beat? Percussion, melody, and leads would vary massively for us, and the kicks could be where they wanted, but the snare? The snare would have to be on the half-time of the 140BPM beat, so that it would sound slower than 140BPM. That's why I've never practiced. I haven't had any form of mixing equipment in my house for ten years. Loefah would give me a tune and I'd play it on Rinse, some time between 9 and 11 PM, and that's it till the next club or radio show. It's like math: if I knew that the snare is always there, my mixes would work.

ORIS JAY: The minute the CD got involved, though, that's when the sharing culture began to change. Because producers would burn tracks to CD, they'd bring sonically weaker, but more experimental, music to try out in the club. If I bring a dub to the club, I have to get that tune properly finished because it'll cost me 40 quid. A CD costs you, what, 60p? It was more instant, but then you get half-finished tunes played in the club.

MARTIN CLARK: Rinse had a party around the Christmas of 2004, in a converted toilet in east London called Public Life, which was right by where the Rinse studios are now. [DJ and Hotflush Recordings founder] Scuba was playing, and he asked Loefah for a tune of his, so that he could cut it. He didn't cut it, though. He played it off a CD, and Loefah was livid: "You played my track un-mastered, on a soundsystem! It's not fucking balanced."

LOEFAH: You have to realize: for a time, there were maybe 50 dubstep tracks in the whole world. If five of them are mine, I'm not just going to chuck them out there. We were funding DMZ ourselves—through student loans, and Mala and Coki's wages—so we felt that we had the right to be precious.

ORIS JAY: If I were to pin it right down, it came from the reggae soundsystem culture: you'd have guys with systems from different sides of Jamaica, and the most popular system would get booked for all the parties, so there's competition. If there are hundreds of DJs playing the same music, what makes you different from me? You find a new producer and say, "Let me play your music first. I'm not saying don't give it to anyone else, I'm saying don't give it to anyone else before me."

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CHAPTER SIX: "Who the fuck are these weirdos?"

Youngsta, Crazy D, Skepta, and Plastician at FWD>>

CHAPTER BIOS:

Sgt Pokes: The main MC for the DMZ club club nights, Sgt Pokes has MC'd dubstep parties for over 15 years.
Loefah: A producer, DJ and one of the core members of the DMZ club night and label, he also runs the Swamp81 label.
El-B: A key producer and DJ in the transitional period between garage and dubstep, formerly part of garage duo Groove Chronicles.
Kode9: Scottish-born, London-based producer and DJ, who founded and continues to run the Hyperdub label.
Oris Jay: Also known as Darqwuan, the Sheffield-based producer and DJ helped to lead the breaks element of the dubstep sound.
Martin Clark: A London-based journalist and DJ who has worked for a variety of UK publications and now runs the Keysound label and club night.
Skream: Croydon-born producer and DJ who was picked up as the so-called teenage poster boy of the dubstep scene.

SGT POKES: For years, Hatcha, Youngsta, [Croydon DJ and producer] N-Type and Chef were the DJs. That was it. Those relationships, and that serious exclusivity, are what built the scene. They were also, in part, as a clubbing experience, reactions to how fucking boring drum and bass had become. Garage, too, had become badboy culture, with its cheesy pop vibes. British hip-hop never got the recognition it deserved. You just had dissatisfied customers from all these different scenes who were sick of feeling cheated.

LOEFAH: We weren't into the glitz and bottles of the jungle scene, but the other lot from Croydon—the garage boys—loved it. We used to go up to FWD>> in a south London convoy. We used to meet at Hatcha's house; me, Mala, and Coki would be in Mala's car—a blacked-out Rover, like a dealer's car—and follow Hatcha, Skream, Chef, Plasticman [Croydon DJ now known as Plastician], and N-Type in their cars. Sometimes they'd get a stretch limo, in their tracksuit bottoms and shit. We'd park round the corner because we're from Norwood, innit, but they'd roll up in this hired stretch limo, not giving one fuck.

EL-B: Garage came to mean conformity for me: pathetic, manufactured shit. People from the hood have always loved to dress flash, so when you checked [Vauxhall club night] Liberty and Twice As Nice there was always gonna be shirt 'n' shoes, popping bottles, and all that shit, but it got weird. Pre-2000, you were in garage raves with Arsenal and Chelsea players. After 2000, it was grunge-ass stoners and students.

KODE9: When it comes to dubstep in the clubs, you need to distinguish some stages. When FWD>> was at Velvet Rooms, around 2001-03, it was more of a garage crowd: a lot of DJs, producers and industry types, men and women, coming to party. It was when it moved to [recently closed East London club] Plastic People that it became that something else. One of the most important things that happened to catalyze dubstep was that, on a soundsystem like that, you could you get away with producing such minimal, heavy track—tracks that had one snare an hour, one hi-hat every two hours, loads of sub in between. That wouldn't have worked on any other system, as far as I'm concerned.

"Pre-2000, you were in garage raves with Arsenal and Chelsea players. After 2000, it was grunge-ass stoners and students." – El-B

ORIS JAY: There was a period around 2002-03 where the music started to split into distinct strands: the darker side of garage—where [dubstep] came from—then into breaks, broken beat, and grime. None of the scenes were big, but all of them had a unique sound, and everyone's influences determined which direction the sound was going to go in. Take DJ Zinc's "138 Trek": even though it was classed as garage, even though the dubstep guys were playing it, it had a break-beat in it. The grime guys were different to the breaks mentality, because they wanted a beat that would give them space to rap in and around. Broken beat had vocals, but it was still underground. It was all at the same tempo, being played at the same place—but getting more, minutely specific.

Those intricacies were partly why a lot of the guys in the crowd were trainspotters. Someone else will have a track of mine, for example, but when I play it out I might play a VIP edit of it, so you know that it's me. Then you get the geeks going: "I know what this is, and this must be Oris Jay playing right now because this is a version I haven't heard before." If you were playing FWD>>, you had to come correct. You couldn't play what you played the week before.

"Grime and dubstep were like family, and family doesn't always get along." – Martin Clark

MARTIN CLARK: Everyone at FWD>> brought their own sounds, so there was a dynamic tension between everyone having enough of their own space and identity, and being connected enough to be related: the bare minimum things in common in order to make it coherent enough, and have space to explore.

This doesn't get stressed enough in this conversation, though: the fact that grime had a major influence on the evolution of dubstep. [DJ and co-founder of Rinse FM] Geeneus in particular saw the possibilities of dubstep: forming a relationship with Sarah [Lockhart], bringing Ammunition and Rinse together, then coming to FWD>> with [Rinse FM co-founder and influential DJ] Slimzee standing at the back. People would turn around and go, "Fuck, Slimzee's here."

Grime and dubstep were like family, and family doesn't always get on. Grime rode the wave of the garage club infrastructure, but when the police shut much of that down, they lost the money and access that came with it. I can sympathize with grime. They wanted more, right? It's an MC-focused culture. They wanted to be stars. Grime went into a lull after [Dizzee Rascal's debut album] Boy in da Corner when they realized there wasn't another quick Dizzee—or [that] the industry wouldn't accept another, more like. Wiley's Treddin' on Thin Ice wasn't the smash that he and others wanted it to be. The scene couldn't deliver commercially on its own hype, and that was the period of dubstep starting to develop properly.

Up until 2003-04, grime was much more creative than dubstep. What Wiley and Dizzee could do sonically was just shocking. Dubstep was still in this phase of essentially being dark 2-steppish garage—rolling along, resting on the darkness to give it an edge—and hadn't really engineered its own DNA yet. With grime, there was an almost addictive shock of how strange it was: the 8-bar structure and the energy of the MCs. Grime was running London, and they looked to dubstep and thought, 'Who the fuck are these weirdos standing about in a room in Shoreditch?'

After 2004, it wasn't that one was more creative than the other—8-bar grime inspired a lot of Benga and Skream's early records, with that raw drum sound and the warping basslines, and Plastician had this amazing period with [record label] Terrorhythm. But dubstep gradually became a more transferable sound. [Grime and dubstep's] intermittent intertwining was very interesting, and unparalleled.

SGT POKES: The grime beat was always just a conduit for a tough ego for me. Dubstep MCs weren't MCs; they were hosts: "We are here to hear dubstep, and you are here to present it to us." The dances were de-militarized zones. It wasn't, "He plays dubstep, he makes dubstep"—all of us are dubstep. We didn't care if we played first or next, because it was an arc of a night. "What have you cut, what have you brought..." It was about being very aware of everyone else and the role that they were there to play. "If we all do well, then this sound does well."

I even started to think that MCs began to resemble DJs in the way dogs begin to resemble their owners. With [MC] Task and Youngsta, it wasn't about hype: "Yeah, take it well easy, mate." Task was, like, the anti-MC. With Hatcha, though, you heard that it was party time in [MC] Crazy D's voice: the lively lad about town, with that tribal madness. In fact, I remember Spaceape even used to hide sometimes when he was on the mic. It was real.

But when Wiley, JME and Jammer were at FWD>>, hearing [Skream's] " Midnight Request Line," the impact of the music being that good was important for both scenes. I think that a lot of the artists the grime MCs tried to work with were the ones with the big tunes smashing up the clubs, but they weren't necessarily the best producers to work with for their style. There was a lot of bootlegging, too: versions of a lot of tunes that were never OK'd, and that annoyed a lot of dubstep artists. It happened to Skream, I'm sure.

SKREAM: During the bootleg era, you had [Youngsta's] "Pulse X," but also Pulse Y, Z, fucking ABC, and all different "Eskimo" ones, too. "Midnight Request Line" came from how I used to take 8-bar grime instrumentals and try to make them darker. When I made "Midnight Request Line" I gave it to Hatcha and he didn't like it. There were two or three other tracks on the CD that he preferred, and I didn't think much else of it. Youngsta was really into it, though, and I sent it to [grime DJ and Boy Better Know member] DJ Maximum after Wiley, Skepta, and Jammer talked about hearing it at FWD>>.

Hatcha still didn't really play it until I did him a VIP mix of it, actually, and Skepta didn't believe that I made it for ages, either. His exact words were, "You look like a student." To be fair, I was in a pink and green Ralph Lauren rugby top, with shorts and deck shoes. I didn't give off the most urban edge. It took him a while to believe I made it, but then it became Skepta's anthem for quite a while.

Around that time—and this was quite a grime thing, to be fair—if you had a big record you'd have other, similar versions. I had seven or eight [versions of "Midnight Request Line"] that were all phone-related—fuck knows, don't ask me why—and I worked with JME on them. I remember Skepta calling me up, moody as anything, being like, "Why are you working with my brother? Why aren't you working with me?" because he blew up "Midnight Request Line" to a different crowd. He was pissed, but I was like, "Bruv, I've tried to get you in the studio for so long, and you've been unprofessional." So JME and I ended up doing " Tapped."

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CHAPTER SEVEN: "Why the fuck would I give a fuck about your postcode?"

Hijak at Rinse FM in 2006

CHAPTER BIOS:

Kode9: Scottish-born, London-based producer and DJ, who founded and continues to run the Hyperdub label.
Skream: Croydon-born producer and DJ who was picked up as the so-called teenage poster boy of the dubstep scene.
Sgt Pokes: The main MC for the DMZ club nights, Sgt Pokes has MC'd dubstep parties for over 15 years.

KODE9: Both grime and dubstep were encouraged by the fact that those producers weren't allowed into the wider garage scene. They took that insult of the word "grime" and turned it into something positive. Others came from a Metalheadz background, like raves at the [Hoxton club] Blue Note around 94-95, so they'd all been in the same room together ten years before, but hadn't met until dubstep was happening. It was a shrinking. People often say that grime came first—which, from the outside, may seem true—but dubstep was bubbling away. It was just that everyone, bar a dozen weirdos in one or two clubs, fucking hated it.

For me, 2002-03 was the heyday of grime, and 2003-05 was the heyday of dubstep, even though neither were getting any real recognition from the other. And, to be quite honest, I found it funny how territorial the grime crews and south London dubstep lot were. Being this weird Scottish alien, I could take it all as good music, and that's why it was a no-brainer for me to play both grime and dubstep at FWD>> and on Rinse. They were the same speed, it's all from the same city—why the fuck would I give a fuck about your postcode?

I still think the sonic relationship between grime and dubstep was a path that could have been explored more. It's weird—apart from "Midnight Request Line," grime DJs didn't gravitate towards dubstep tracks until dubstep became much more aggressive and wobbly—and that was a fucking disaster. It was heartbreaking to see grime DJs—and I loved everything they did previously—finally coming over into dubstep and playing absolute shit.

When I started on Rinse, I was the only Scottish guy with a bunch of Cockneys. I was petrified to talk for the first few months because I was a total fanboy of London music culture, so it felt wrong for me to be on pirate radio here. Around 2003, though, Rinse asked me to do the FWD>> show. I think it was weekly on a Tuesday, straight after [Wiley's influential grime collective] Roll Deep Crew's show, which was 7-9PM. This was when Rinse was [still a pirate station and] up in the tower blocks in Bow, too. It was a total shithole; a room built inside a room, with the only "soundsystem" being one battered-to-fuck ghetto blaster with one speaker working. It was ropey as hell.

SKREAM: Rinse used to be fucking mental. When I started my show, the studio was in some mad old studio space in Limehouse, with a trans porn set-up in the same building. You used to walk out at like 2 or 3 AM and see really creepy looking people. I was in and out for my show, mostly. You used to get some pretty ghetto people in there at that time, but you'd just get stoned, drunk, and go home.

KODE9: At that point, Rinse weren't archiving the sets, but there was a website called barefiles.com. It was on it, too: by the time I'd got home from doing my show, the set would already be online. I really do think that, along with the articles on Hyperdub, and the streaming files on dubplate.net, BareFiles had quite a big influence on how early dubstep spread overseas.

SGT POKES: Damn [laughs]—don't even talk to Sarah [Lockhart] about BareFiles. There was this really awkward moment once: BareFiles was run by this kid who was just into the music, a reclusive stoner with a couple of servers in his house, running some gambling website for this older guy, who started archiving everything with a guy called Boom Noise. At first they were called the Bare Noise Files, and Rinse turned around and got a bit gangster on them, saying, "You can't be taking our recordings and hosting them," and so on—so they had to take it all down. It was about preserving a moment, though, so....

KODE9: When I used to teach at the University of East London, I'd go straight from class to go do the FWD>> show on Rinse. I was just finishing teaching one day, in the January of 2006, when I got a phone call out of the blue. It was Wiley. He said, "Hi mate, do you mind if I come on your show and guest tonight?" I was completely floored—starstruck, even. Since I started Hyperdub, and thought about what dubstep could be, and what grime could be, it was the first time I got to actualize these ideas. It was a shock to him as well, because I'm not sure he knew what he was getting himself into. But that was the most fun I ever had doing a radio show. In a way, it's the radio show that's had the biggest lasting effect. I still get emails about it, ten years later.

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CHAPTER EIGHT: "Skull Disco were so tongue in cheek they were licking their fucking ears, mate."

The DMZ dancefloor, 2005

CHAPTER BIOS:

Sgt Pokes: The main MC for the DMZ club nights, Sgt Pokes has MC'd dubstep parties for over 15 years.
Loefah: A producer, DJ and one of the core members of the DMZ club night and label, he also runs the Swamp81 label.
Chef: A dub cutter and engineer at Croydon's Transition Studios, he was also one of the early core DJs of the dubstep scene, joining Skream and Benga's Smooth Criminals crew as a teenager.

SGT POKES: FWD>> was definitely the first proper place to go and listen to dubstep, but there were other parties going on, too. Warp [Records] was doing a night called Rebel Bass at Electrowerkz [in Angel], booking people like Mala and myself, as well as some of the more industrial sounds, like Slaughter Mob and Vex'd. Then Plastician and his mate Filthy Dave, Dave Carlisle, started a night called Filthy Dub at the end of 2003; the first was a proper Croydon cheese club called One92One, but that club wasn't ready for the sound. At The Black Sheep we tried to do a night called Dub Session while I was still working there in 2004-05. We'd bring someone in to play nice traditional reggae and dub at 7PM, then, at around 10 or 11PM, as the standard customers would leave, we'd introduce an hour or two of dubstep.

LOEFAH: Yeah, Pokes and I worked behind the bar at The Black Sheep. It was the one bar in Croydon where you didn't have to wear a shirt and shoes. It ended up as a Sunday night upstairs in the Old Blue Last [in Shoreditch], called Pub Sessions: a crate of Red Stripe, £25 [$40] each, playing old dub 7-inches, and then dubstep later in the night, mashing up the windows. That lasted six months or so, in around 2004.

There was also Blue Note in Hoxton Square, with the main part of the rave in the basement through a stairwell, with a killer soundsystem. It was really cool for me: I'd just been to chavvy jungle raves in Croydon, and suddenly I was raving in Hoxton. The jungle vibe was the hangover of the 90s, when it was so hardcore with the drugs. It partied 'til it couldn't party any more. What I liked about early dubstep parties were that they were more controlled. At Metalheadz we used to get a few bottles of Guinness Exports and smoke a couple of zoots, and dubstep was the same.

SGT POKES: Don't forget the [dubstep record label] Skull Disco parties, neither, in a working men's club in N16 [Stoke Newington]. I'll tell you what about the Skull Disco lads—they were the first Bristol guys to come to a dubstep rave in London and fucking dance. They'd be at the front in Third Bass [a part of Mass, the venue in Brixton where DMZ was founded], under the netting and purple UV lights, and when they came into the dance they'd smuggle in bottles of drink and just have it; weird, big-lick techno dancing. They gave a lot of people confidence to not worry about how to dance or how to look. Skull Disco were so tongue-in-cheek, they were licking their fucking ears, mate.

CHEF: I remember [producer and Skull Disco co-founder] Shackleton sticking his head in the speakers at FWD>> and thinking, 'Man is bonkers, bruv—his eardrums must be made of steel.' So obviously the Skull Disco parties in Stoke Newington were nutty shit. DMZ001 had just come out, and Mala brought along a box of, like, 40 of them to sell at the club. I think he charged a fiver for a dub. As Skream and I walked into the party, "Judgement" was playing, which had come out a week or two before, and Skream went mental. I reckon he was just happy someone had bought his record, innit.

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CHAPTER NINE: "The pressure was so heavy it made your eyeballs vibrate."

MC Dangerous at DMZ, 2005

CHAPTER BIOS:

Pinch: A Bristol-based producer and DJ who founded and continues to run the Tectonic label.

PINCH: The first time I came down to FWD>> I hadn't even been for a night out in London before. I was 22 or 23-years-old, and a bunch of us came up in a car from Bristol. It was a lot smaller than I imagined—thick with weed smoke, a packed dancefloor, but with hardly any dancing going on. I thought, 'This is fucking weird.' I got myself a drink, squeezed into the crowd, sparked a zoot and nodded my head along to Kode9. His set sent me off in so many directions—jungle polyrhythms, drum and bass, techno, the dub spaciousness, and fucking ridiculous bass—and I decided, there and then, that this was a sound that would work in Bristol.

The monthly club night I started, Context, initially ran from January to December of 2004. Right through to 2005, Context would rarely be more than 100 people in the dance. Initially, the dub and roots scene in Bristol was very insular, and many of the heads think that you shouldn't mess with the sacred formula, so those ardent fans weren't that keen on dubstep. But by the start of 2006—and no coincidence, around the time of Mary Anne Hobbs' Breezeblock Dubstep Warz show [a one-off Radio 1 show that marked the moment dubstep went global]—it was literally like throwing open the doors to a cellar that no one had been in for years.

The second Subloaded [a Bristol dubstep night co-founded by Pinch and DJ Blazey] birthday is probably the most legendary one. The Black Swan [in Bristol] is a pretty grimy venue, but they didn't mind you putting in a massive soundsystem, which was run by a crew called Dirt, who provided 12 Syko [subwoofers] made by a company called Void. This was also just before buying magic mushrooms became illegal, and, totally unexpectedly, I turned up on the night and there was this middle-aged hippy with a table, selling mushrooms on the night—which was weird.

Because there weren't that many dubstep events—it was just after the first DMZ, in April 2005—the London crew came up, too. Skream, N-Type—well, they weren't playing, but they enjoyed the mushroom service. [The soundsystem] Dissident were on a mission that night. The pressure was so heavy it made your eyeballs vibrate. When the bass kicked in, everything went fuzzy. It was fucking great.

There was such a pressure on the little built-up stage we had that you had back-blast from the speakers. Loefah played the "I" remix on dubplate, and he swears that, as he stood there, with everyone going nuts, he opened his eyes and the needle was at the end of the record. He completely zoned out. Another guy swore that he was hallucinating from the bass. It was like a pressure chamber. People were coming out after 20 minutes saying they needed a break. Mala and Loefah played back to back, and when one was playing the other had to get offstage and rest.

That pressure came to define much of the technique of the sound, too. When I played Berlin in 2005, before the first Tectonic Plates [a series of compilations released on Pinch's label Tectonic] had been released, I had Skream's " Bahl Fwd" on dubplate. I played in this weird venue, which was set in a bank vault and still had a caged-off safety deposit box room and everything: very small, with very thick walls and a decent soundsystem. While I was DJing, [grime MC] Jammer and his crew passed through, and when someone got on the mic this weird shit started happening.

The bass would get ridiculous, and the mixer would be bouncing on the table like a glass. When I dropped "Bahl Fwd," a pile of flyers went up into the air like confetti and I had to catch the mixer and hold it down. I thought we'd hit the resonant frequency of the room. I worked out that every time the MC was getting hype, they were standing in front of the speaker while the bass of the mic was on full; you got bass feedback through the mic sending the place so mad that you felt that you were being crushed. I thought I was going to die in that room. That tune is one of the heaviest dubstep tracks that's ever been cut, because he didn't have any EQ on the bass: full power, untouched bass.

For Bristol parties, it was probably around 2007 with Subloaded—when I teamed up with [DJ] Stryda from [Bristol dub group] Dubkasm, with us upstairs and [soundsystem] Teachings in Dub downstairs, in [night club] Clockwork – that it really kicked off: a 1,000-capacity club, with 1,200 to 1,300 in the room and turning a few hundred away at the door. It got to the point where the bouncers couldn't even control the ticketed crowd outside. By midnight, there were police horses charging up and down the road, trying to get people away from the traffic. If you think that was mad, though, it was nothing compared to the first DMZ birthday.

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CHAPTER TEN: "You have grown-ass men jumping up and hugging each other."

Chef, Sgt Pokes, and Crazy D at DMZ, 2005

CHAPTER BIOS:

Mala: One of the founding members of the London-based DMZ club night and label, he's also one half of the production duo Digital Mystikz, along with Coki, as well as a solo DJ and producer.
Joe Nice: Baltimore, Maryland-based DJ who started the first dubstep party in America, Dub War.
Pinch: A Bristol-based producer and DJ who founded and continues to run the Tectonic label.

MALA: We did our first ever [DMZ] dance in the January of 2005. The owner of the venue was like, "You are all mad. Why are you putting a party on? Last weekend was New Year's Eve, no one's going to come." My mentality was: "You can only hear this music in this one club in the whole world," so I felt confident. That night, there was a new record attendance. Then it spiraled; Mary Anne Hobbs' Dubstep Warz Breezeblock broadcast was on January 10, 2006, and the DMZ first birthday was Saturday, March 4.

JOE NICE: I remember this vividly: Mala and I drove over to Mass in Brixton together, and I asked him, "Yo, any tunes I should look out for tonight, brother?" Mala looks at me and says, "Joe [Coki] played this new bit for me and I started laughing when it dropped. I couldn't believe it. Trust me, bruv—it's gonna be the one." Going into Mass was astonishing. For a guy like me, from the US, we didn't have rigs with no limiters, in a room with 30ft ceilings, pummeling you with bass like this. The queue was around the block and down the hill. I'd never been to a party with that many people turning up for one genre of music. 'Something good has to come from this,' I remember thinking.

Inside, Benny Ill and Kode9 were playing sonic voodoo. Chef went back to back with Skream, and then Digital Mystikz played with Loefah for three hours. It was relentless. I was in a cocoon of sub frequency. [Digital Mystikz'] " Anti War Dub," [Mala's] "Bury Da Bwoy," and [Loefah's] "The Goat Stare" and "Root" all got played live for the first time. When I heard "The Goat Stare," with that snare slapping you in the face, and that bassline, cascading, like it was tumbling off a cliff...

You have to remember: dubstep was an alien transmission. House is 120-130BPM, so twice the rate of the average resting heartbeat. Drum and bass is 170BPM, but they usually push it plus four, or plus six, which is 180BPM: three times your heartbeat. It's easy to move to house and drum and bass. Dubstep is 140BPM, but it feels like you're moving at 70BPM. It's the earth moving. You know, logically, that you're spinning really fast, but it feels as if time isn't going anywhere. We're born with a sense of rhythm, and it's difficult to re-train a habit you were born with.

Mala fades a tune out, and "Haunted" begins. The whole crowd are going nuts. You have grown-ass men jumping up and hugging each other. Pull it up. Drop it again. Someone from behind the decks walks up and stops it. Sgt Pokes is on the mic. Mala drops it a third time and, before the drop, Benny Ill reaches over the decks from the crowd and kills it. The crowd are screaming.

Coki isn't even at the decks. He's in the corner smoking up, watching the mayhem that he's creating from a tune that he'd made a week or two before. We let the crowd noise die, Mala puts the needle down and Skream walks up and stops it—four pull-ups now. Only on the fifth time did it actually get played out. When it comes to Coki's own set, in the space of 30 minutes, only five or six tracks get played out. I thought the walls were going to fall down.

PINCH: There was a deep understanding of what was current, so a lot of the time the rewind came from, "Fuck, I haven't heard this before—I need to hear how it comes in again!" That's why it was being called for. On the DMZ first birthday, there were people calling for [rewinds of] tunes when they already knew them; with so much excitement in the air, the previously more muted crowd reactions just exploded. The philosophy behind the call on the rewind before then was more about newness—because you might not hear it again for another two months, at the next DMZ. But that changed that night. I think it's never been the same in the scene since, either.

MALA: I remember when certain basslines would roll out; it would be almost like a delayed reaction in the dance. The time it would take for the low, low bottom-end frequency to go through someone's body, you would see and almost hear the audience respond at a slight delay from each other the further back in the dance you go, as the bass wave is physically moving through people: this kind of raw "coming up" when the tune would drop. Before DMZ, I'd only ever really seen that happen at [legendary roots reggae soundsystem] Jah Shaka dances.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN: "If you get the frequency right, everything else is filler."

From left to right on the back bench) Mala, Coki, Crazy D, Benga, Hatcha

CHAPTER BIOS:

Martin Clark: A London-based journalist and DJ who has worked for a variety of UK publications and now runs the Keysound label and club night.
Mala: One of the founding members of the London-based DMZ club night and label, he's also one half of the production duo Digital Mystikz, as well as a solo DJ and producer.
Coki: The other half of Digital Mystikz, Coki is one of the core members of the DMZ label and club night.

MARTIN CLARK: The appeal of DMZ as a club night, a label and with Digital Mystikz was the opposition to how drum and bass had developed. Drum and bass suffered from people who thought the engineering was more important than the music. There's nothing wrong with having great sonic value, but engineering a track to be as impactful as possible means generating a physical and emotional response. With that idea in dubstep, you cannot underestimate how much the Mystikz made that the standard.

COKI: The style was very minimal, so it was open to atmospheric sounds to come through, with vocals that enhanced certain vibrations. My style was taken from scales. There might be a dub track with a scale played in E sharp, and I'm like, "I don't know that scale, I'm just used to C," so I started on a different melodic sound that I felt was coming from the same root as dub. A lot of the time, dub uses minor scales, and I just used major, so that's what created a different aura to the Mystikz' sound. I guess I tried to get it out of dub, but it didn't come out how I wanted it to.

MALA: When I was building beats, I was always on the black keys. The way I always saw the music was that it wasn't about pure destruction, but at the same time, things were kind of grey. I remember being quite militant: to prove myself to the world and to myself. [I was wrapped up in] how society says that you have to "be a man"—to have a car, a mortgage and all that shit. So part of that exploration was being channelled into making that music. We were definitely stripping it all out, just straight bones and a three-note melody. If you get the right frequency—if you're able to channel that energy in its true light—then everything else is filler.

I think a lot of people think that when they make a contribution to a sound they want to try to "add something," but you can contribute by taking away. I didn't say, "I'm in the studio, I'm writing songs." I said, "I'm in the studio, I'm building beats." That's why, on the center labels of every DMZ record, it says, "built by Mala," "built by Loefah." Joe Nice said something to me years ago when we were in my studio that I always liked: that if he had to describe my music, he'd say it was "like Bruce Lee: the energy is really controlled, but you know that, at any moment, it could rip everything apart."

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CHAPTER TWELVE: "They were chatting this bad-mind pollution."

MC Task, Loefah, and Youngsta at Rinse FM

CHAPTER BIOS:

Sgt Pokes: The main MC for the DMZ club nights, Sgt Pokes has MC'd dubstep parties for over 15 years.
Coki: One half of Digital Mystikz, along with Mala, Coki is one of the core members of the DMZ label and club night.

SGT POKES: Genuinely, for the longest time, with the harmony of the perceived dubstep starting line up, it was a long, long time before cracks showed. It all went through transitional shifts but Mala was, and always has been, the figurehead for the unity of the sound: he is black and white, and makes music that is black and white. I actually used to joke that Mala and Skream were the dubstep pound coin: Mala was heads, and Skream was tails.

Everyone was very supportive—and against the odds sometimes, too. I remember, around the time of the Winter Music Conference in 2006 or 2007, when two prominent drum and bass artists tried to round up a load of the young dubstep guys, like Quest and Silkie. They thought, 'These are the guys that are showing promise. They're going to be the next generation of core artists.' They were chatting this bad-mind pollution: "All these guys—Mala, Loefah, Skream—they're taking the piss out of you. You should be doing these huge shows"—chatting shit in an attempt to get them to join an agency they'd started. They were creating bad feeling to try to get an investment. It didn't work with us, though. We stuck together.

Another thing was that the producers who were making the more breaks-influenced stuff weren't part of the Croydon mob. It wasn't even a north and south thing. It was the Croydon sound. Before AIM [AOL instant messenger], people weren't passing on tunes so freely, there were less shows—people were watching each other's backs, you know? After AIM, all of sudden you've got more bookings, more emails, more music being spread online—and that glue started to decay.

I remember that when we were doing DMZ at Third Bass, [producers] Search and Destroy were working with Caspa back when he was called Quietstorm, and they put on a party at Mass. We were like, "Hang on. Caspa is a west London guy. Why are they coming down to here, of all of the venues?" We wanted more dubstep parties, sure, but it was an unspoken thing. Maybe we shouldn't have been so precious, but we felt like it was a bit of a snide move. Short story: that's why Caspa never played a DMZ.

As an ethos, you can't fault it, but one thing that affected us, I think, was that Coki wasn't really doing shows. He'd come to them but wasn't really playing, so it was me, Mala and Loefah, but you know what they say—a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Coki is a genius. I think we needed him more than we realized.

COKI: I had a lot of other things in my head back then. My son was born in 2003, and I was still working full-time. I didn't really have a relationship with what was going on apart from DMZ and FWD>>. All that time, people would say to me, "Bruv you're big, you know? Why are you sitting in an office?"—and I didn't have a clue. I was blind to what was going on. Even when I made "Night" with Benga: I heard it on the radio, I saw my name on the TV, that it was getting played in Ayia Napa, and I thought, Why am I working? But, I didn't leave my job until 2011.

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN: "We had to contend with a new generation that had never heard of us."

Youngsta in 2005

CHAPTER BIOS:

Martin Clark: A London-based journalist and DJ who has worked for a variety of UK publications and now runs the Keysound label and club night.
Sgt Pokes: The main MC for the DMZ club nights, Sgt Pokes has MC'd dubstep parties for over 15 years.
Loefah: A producer, DJ and one of the core members of the DMZ club night and label, he also runs the Swamp81 label.
El-B: A key producer and DJ in the transitional period between garage and dubstep, formerly part of garage duo Groove Chronicles.
Oris Jay: Also known as Darqwuan, the Sheffield-based producer and DJ helped to lead the breaks element of the dubstep sound.
Mala: One of the founding members of the London-based DMZ club night and label, he's also one half of the production duo Digital Mystikz, along with Coki, as well as a solo DJ and producer.
Coki: The other half of Digital Mystikz, Coki is one of the core members of the DMZ label and club night.

MARTIN CLARK: Digital Mystikz were an incredible production duo, but they also established a center of power with DMZ. There were people whose careers ended there. [London producer and DJ] J Da Flex was supposed to play the first DMZ and he was given the final slot, which was considered a great honor. He said, "I'm not playing last"—and he never played DMZ again. He's not a big influence in dubstep any more for various reasons. As DMZ as a vehicle grew, J Da Flex became a vocal agitator for the breaks side of it all—"this other stuff is too dead, it's too quiet, it's too minimal, too weird"—but that side of things got lost.

What people think of as dubstep now is only half of what the dubstep scene really was. The other side was a much smaller, but still intense, group of people who wanted to take the percussive patterns of garage and make them more break-focused, essentially building on from "138 Trek>" Those camps in the beginning were harmonious but, by 2004-05, once half-step became a blueprint, they started to really not get on.

People like Caspa, Search and Destroy, Oris Jay, and to an extent with labels like Hotflush, were all in it together. Because it was all evolving on the fly, a few people straddled both camps and they all got booked for the same clubs, but in the way that the Plasticman sound is distinct from, say, Digital Mystikz, Search and Destroy's was distinct from Loefah. 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 around DMZ: booking and not booking certain people, playing and not playing certain records, releasing and not releasing certain records. When you look at DMZ line-ups, you don't see many people that were from the other side of the camp. Although when we say "the other side," they were all still partying in the same room together at FWD>>.

Breaks were borderline [derogatory name for a type of dubstep-influenced music created by the likes of Caspa, Rusko, and Skrillex that is listened to predominantly by lairy, musclebound university-age pissheads] brostep at the time, but it became even more distorted, overdriven, and over-compressed. Long before this shift, I was asking [London superclub] Fabric in 2002-03 to do a Hatcha CD, which would have been seminal, but instead we did Dubstep Allstars. Looking at it now, there is no touching that series, but you can't underestimate the effect the Caspa and Rusko Fabriclive mix had on the progression of the sound—and not in a good way.

SGT POKES: To be fair to Caspa and Rusko, the story with their Fabriclive mix CD goes is that [Parisian house duo] Justice were asked to do that mix, and Justice turned in this weird French music. Then, Fabric are phoning around, going, "This has to get done really, really soon," and apparently they asked a lot of the dubstep people to do it, but nobody wanted it. Apart from Caspa and Rusko. They took a lot of stick for that release. They got a lot of the blame for the direction of the sound. The majority of the tunes in that mix are good tunes, but it just wasn't a fair representation of what it was to be in a dubstep party. They were highlight tunes that you wanted to hear peppered through sets, not back-to-back for over an hour. It was like a rave mega-mix.

LOEFAH: That Fabriclive mix CD got offered to a load of us in the scene but we were like, "Nah"—and then some lads who weren't from Croydon jumped on it. I have two sides to this. Pragmatically, I think, 'Fuck it, they did their thing just like we did ours. They came at it independently and smashed it.' But when someone who'd been DJing and making dubstep tracks for less time than you were all of a sudden playing Fabric, that was when we thought, Fuck, we're not in control of this any more. It was coming from producers who weren't from Croydon. We were like, "You don't get it. We've never talked with you lot." People say that tracks like "Spongebob" and "Haunted" changed it all, but they at least have genuinely interesting beat patterns. When Caspa and Rusko came along, I started to lose interest.

"If it weren't for Sarah Lockhart and Mary Anne Hobbs, there wouldn't be any of this. The boys were running around, but these two women brought it all together." – Oris Jay

EL-B: When Noodles [Steven Jude, the other half of the production duo Groove Chronicles with El-B] and I split around 2000-01, he gave me a call. He could have been spiteful, but he said: "You and your dubstep scene, it's a small pond. The sound has no dynamic." When I came back in 2006, and brought the Ghost [Recordings, El-B's label] crew with me to the dubstep clubs, they were all pissed off that every single DJ was trying to be as hard as they bloody could: all the groove had gone, and had been replaced by just, noise. A groove isn't always necessary, but variety is. Me, Oris Jay, Zed Bias: our sound got left out. It had only been three or four years, but we had to contend with a new generation of fans that had never heard of us.

ORIS JAY: As soon as you had money, and status, then it's got to change. It was like King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table: we all had our parts to play. Then Arthur started making money, the exclusivity gets tighter and DJs became stars. Not on purpose, but Mary Anne Hobbs was our King Arthur. Everyone was on the same level and, like most, stumbled on dubstep by beautiful accident—and then got it played on Radio 1.

When you think about the context of the time: the most you're going to get out of a track before that is on Rinse at 3 AM, or in one or two basement clubs in London. All of a sudden, it's getting aired on the BBC. The Dubstep Warz Breezeblock show aired 2-4 AM here, so during the day or early evening in the US, and that made the Americans pay attention. Basically: it made it big in America, which made it big in the UK. Within 18 months, everyone who was featured on that show got status, straight away.

And another important thing that doesn't get talked about as much as it should: when I look at the scene as a whole, there were hardly any women, but if it weren't for Sarah Lockhart and Mary Anne Hobbs, there wouldn't be any of this. The boys were running around, but these two women brought it all together. This was a whole ecosystem of music that no one knew about, and they decided to tell the whole world about it. None of us would be where we are without Sarah, and the exposure would never have happened without Mary Anne.

SGT POKES: Look, the way I see it is this: drum and bass lost its dynamic because of the way it was produced, but dubstep lost much of its dynamic by the late 2000s because of the way it was played. If Mala played "Thief in the Night" and "Hunter" and then "Spongebob," that's like Tyson walking into the club and knocking you the fuck out. If you play "Spongebob," then "Tree Trunk," then "Sea Sick," it's tear-out without the dynamic range.

By then, there was also a lot of tunnel vision: people leaning over, covering up their work—the paranoid years. There was a lot more drug-taking then, too. We really noticed it at DMZ and FWD>>, particularly after the smoking ban. It's sad to say that it's a crucial part of it, but if you're a smoker, you get used to it. And when it's taken away, it changes how you act. There were more class-As going around the ravers, and then the artists dramatically ravaged it.

LOEFAH: It changed the rave because all of a sudden, there was no weed, and it was all class-As. If you're on coke and pills, you're not up for the space. You're there to go mental. It became a uniform sound after that. It was a soul-destroying period for me. I stopped writing so many tunes, and I started playing tunes at raves that I didn't even like. That's why I started [the label] Swamp81: I needed something new—again.

MALA: I think the smoking ban did have an impact on the sound and the dances. For a crew with hard smokers, what happens with a smoking ban is that you have an audience that aren't focused for the whole session. You're getting people coming in and going out, and that was disruptive to the dances because it had the effect of shortening people's attention spans; high impact and quick tunes get the quick response.

But, look. We can pick apart what happened with dubstep, but the strength of it has been incredible. I think that the quality of sound being the focus—not the fashion, not the magazines that were writing about us—captured the imagination of people who were on the fringes. I don't want to say that was what the dubstep movement's biggest contribution was, but the whole term "bass music"? That certainly didn't exist before dubstep.

The sound reminded people that music is about freedom, about not having to conform to the norms and standards of the day. Mediocrity is inevitable, because it gets saturated, but it also serves its own purpose: people are going to come up with something else because they'll get sick and tired again, too.

COKI: Dubstep put people on a different level—come in and smoke with us, in this vast atmosphere. That's why our dances were de-militarized zones. It felt like you were vibing underwater. What dubstep was becoming by the late 2000s just... it was never that type of party for me. Speaking to Skream, Benga, and Hatcha, and Artwork too, about the levels that they were trying to get to... I knew in myself I couldn't cope with that.

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN: "Dubstep did everything right that it possibly could have done."

Skream at Rinse FM

CHAPTER BIOS:

Artwork: Something of a father figure to a number of younger dubstep DJs, Artwork is a producer, DJ, engineer, and one third of Magnetic Man, along with Skream and Benga.
Skream: Croydon-born producer and DJ who was picked up as the so-called teenage poster boy of the dubstep scene.

ARTWORK: It took the better part of ten years for drum and bass to go around the world, from small club to small club, but dubstep exploded because it was the first time that the internet and music really came together for us. I remember going round to my mate's house and he said, "I've got this thing over here where you can look at anything in the world." I was like, "Fuck off." "No, look," he said, "the CIA has a website." I didn't understand. I watched it go from sending emails, to within a few years seeing people rip records and put them on [central dubstep message board] dubstepforum.net. It was the death of Big Apple, frankly: you go from selling 2000 records to 200 records, because who the fuck wants to buy a record when you can get it for free?

I'm completely averse to saying, "You can't do this, you can't do that," in music, because music moves incredibly fast. And thank fuck it does, otherwise we'd be bored shitless. You can't stop it, or police it, and anyone who tries to is an idiot. When grime started to come out, the older guys in the garage scene had a fucking meeting in the East End about stopping grime: telling record shops not to stock it, because it was ruining garage. I pissed myself laughing. I was like, "That is the most stupid fucking thing I've ever heard in my life." From that moment on, I told myself that I would never act like that. And that's why I loved what we did with Magnetic Man [the "dubstep supergroup featuring Artwork, Skream, and Benga].

After we did our first Magnetic Man show at FWD>>, Sarah Soulja hooked us up with £10,000 [$15,000] from the arts council because they were looking to invest in "new live music" or something. We bought three laptops, hired a van and a tour manager, and did a ten-date UK tour. It got to the point where, a year later, we were doing festivals, and Sony saw a video of us and said, "What is this music? And why are these people playing to 15,000 people?"

When they said, "Go and make the record," it was around the time that dubstep started to get very aggressive but also very pop: with big, formulaic drops. We told Sony that we didn't want to make the record in London, so they hired a massive mansion in Cornwall for us—off-season, from January to March. This was when a record company would say, "Who do you want on this track?" We'd say, "Uhhhh—John Legend?!"—and they'd come back with John Legend. We were like, "Fucking hell," so we took the piss.

We wanted a mansion with a swimming pool, and we want it heated so that Benga could learn how to swim. While we were there, there were lorries turning up once a week. I thought, 'What the fuck are these for?' Turns out, it was oil for heating the pool. Sony spent £9,000 [$14,000] on fuel for this fucking pool. This pool had steam coming off it for two months. We were wrapped up in all of it, to be honest. We didn't give a shit about what was going on with dubstep at the time, either: the sound had turned into a lowest common denominator race for loudness, and we just wanted to write songs for the radio.

Benga in Brixton

SKREAM: We all got cabin fever. We were nearly ripping each other's heads off. The thing is, we're city rats. The whole point of that mansion was so that we weren't able to go in and out, but we weren't used to sitting for long periods of time to make music—we'd do it on the fly at home. We were partying a lot in that house. Three or four days would go by without us doing any work.

I was also writing two albums at once: Outside the Box for myself, and the Magnetic Man album. I'd work with Artwork and Benga during the day, then go to bed and work on my solo stuff on my laptop when everyone else was asleep. It was pretty stressful: there was so much more money involved in Magnetic Man, and if I had an idea for my own album I'd feel bad not sharing it with the group, but in the end, Outside the Box got lost in the shadows and the Magnetic Man album smashed it. More than anything, for me, it was all just a huge relief. I had this tag of the "poster boy of dubstep," so I loved how successful Magnetic Man became. At the end of the day—and whatever is said about the music, the scene, and how it all changed—I think that dubstep did everything right that it possibly could have done.

ARTWORK: I look back on what we created, and it was quite amazing to be there at the actual start of something, you know? When Benny Ill knocked on my studio door and said, "I've made some garage"—and it was wrong. Now, in every club, in every city, there will be someone playing a track affiliated to that very moment. You can say that this is a global sound, but it can be pinpointed to one day, in one shop, and a group or five or six people—and I was one of them. It's mind-blowing, really.

Follow Lauren on Twitter.

All photos courtesy of the Rubin Museum

Around 7:30 PM on a recent Wednesday evening, I stood spread eagle in the center of a circle of a dozen people on the sidewalk of 17th Street and 7th Avenue in New York, as a woman walked toward me in a striped, floral red-purple robe, hawk-feather headdress, and designer glasses. In one hand she held a fan that looked as if she'd ripped off the ass-end of a falcon, and in the other burning aromatic twigs. The woman drew up close to me and, as I'd seen her do with over a dozen people on the street before me, she blew out the flames on the twigs and began to wave and fan the smoke into my face, cooing and humming as she slowly circled my body.

The woman's name was ChokBar, a shaman originally from Kyzyl, the capital of the Tuvan Republic, a largely autonomous Turkic enclave in Russia, just north of Mongolia. But these days ChokBar is a resident of Edgewater, New Jersey, just over the Hudson River. And at the moment, she was in the City to smudge myself and 24 others, realigning our energies with smoke and the team of spirits that she claims work alongside her, before taking us through our shamanic paces.

She claims that the spirits control her as she smudges, so whenever she leans in suddenly to let loose a raptor screech at someone's sternum or left kidney, she can't explain why, save that her ethereal cohort has informed her that she needed to scare something internal straight. She also says that if we listen close enough and open our third eye, we might be able to see or hear the spirits working alongside her—but I suspect that would be hard even for the supernaturally-inclined, given the din of fire trucks racing by and the murmur of passers-by turning into iPhone-toting rubberneckers.

This is not some janky roadside vision quest. ChokBar was invited to perform these rituals by the Rubin Museum, ostensibly as part of its ongoing exhibit "Becoming Another: The Power of Masks." The display features shamanic gear collected from the Pacific Northwest to Tibet, highlighting the continuity and differences between cultural rituals intended to put practitioners in touch with, or even make them briefly a part of, a world of spirits living parallel to our own and influencing the trajectory of human life—a common belief across the big, global tent that is shamanism. But rather than just go on and on about the often fuzzy and flexible aspects of shamanism in a speech, she's decided to try to introduce us to the spirits directly, via a shamanic workshop. Before an audience of about 50 onlookers, she'll guide myself and two dozen others through ecstatic dance, deep meditation, and drumming to come face-to-face with our power animals, which are supposed to be accumulations of energy representing characteristics we need to foster in ourselves.

The ceremony began inside the Rubin Museum's basement theater, where we all stowed our yoga mats and deposited our offerings to the spirits on two candle-lit tables in the warm-red glow of the dimmed lights. ChokBar requested carrots, cheese, chocolate or candy in shiny wrappers, cookies, flowers, milk, rice, strong black tea, or white sugar. After presenting our gifts we had to step out briefly for the smudging, because the Rubin, no matter how hip and alternative it may wish to be, just can't do fire in a crowded theater, not even for taiga spirits.

The attendees are exceptionally diverse in age, race, attire, etc., but while the audience seems to have its fair share of skeptics and curious outsiders, most of the participants seem to be seekers of one sort or another, people eager to consume spiritual experiences to achieve some sense of connection or realization. They sit with the serene and knowing looks of people who believe that they can and will have a deep spiritual experience today—that there's something to the notion of other worlds and beings beyond the comprehension of science, to the abdication of control and surrender to mysterious forces.

I'm not a believer by any stretch of the imagination. While I'm not closed to the notion of things beyond human comprehension (I've got a few stories of existential dread), my own screwy brain and sensory perception have me convinced that most mystical experiences are totally explainable. Thanks to an essential tremor, I shake and spasm constantly. Thanks to some mild depression and poor sleeping habits, I'm familiar with nagging voices in your head, the feeling of black tendrils gripping your brain and squeezing as if something foreign has seized your being and wants to wrench it apart, and the occasional vision of something flashing just out of your range of vision. And thanks to chronic sleep paralysis, I often awake to find myself immobile, molested by vivid audio-visual-tactile hallucinations—black shapes crawling around the edge of my bed and feeling me up with hundreds of hands while whispering in eldritch tongues. I believe I understand the neurological basis from which these things arise, and I tend to describe my possibly paranormal experiences in terms of synapses, neurotransmitter receptors, and chemicals.

But I've joined the crowd for this workshop because I'm fascinated by shamanism. That's actually a pretty broad taxonomical term. Shamanism is a catchall for spiritual traditions active to this day on every continent (even in secular, modern Europe where some try to keep traditions like Bee Mastery alive) cooperating with some spiritual realm to influence the lives and especially the wellbeing of humans. Some shamans use psychotropic drugs, others furious dances and terrifying masks, and others still psychic surgeries, making real or fake incisions and sucking out impurities from a believer's body, to help people overcome anything from emotional troubles to mental illness to physical disability.

Want more spiritual rituals? Watch our doc on the Toad Prophet:

I've spent a good amount of time puzzling in the past about how much shamans believe in their own magic, how much belief-based placebo effects are at work in seemingly miraculous cures, and what the place of shamanism is in modern life and medicine. I'm always trying to figure out just how similar shamanic experiences of spirit worlds are to my own skewered and excessively rationalized naturally altered states. And I'm endlessly fascinated by the adaptability of shamans, who tailor their traditions to fit modern sensibilities, like how ChokBar stresses shamanism's populism and its clear differentiation from organized religions (she calls it pre-religious), specifically addressing typical Western-liberal apprehensions about spirituality. And every now and then I like to get my hands dirty and see if I can open myself to a crossover experience.

But ChokBar has a warning for people like me. She was herself once a hyper-rationalist skeptic, to hear her tell it (born Larisa Koronowski, a translator for the Tuvan government for ages), dubious of the shamans who still outperformed psychologists in popular Tuvan medicine. But eventually the spirits seized her and forced her to confront another world, telling her that her name would be All and None (Chok is Tuvan for nothing, negative, while Bar is to have, affirmative). This is actually a prototypical shamanic origin story in the modern era, where most claim they accept their duties reluctantly—I can never figure out whether they believe this honestly, or whether it helps them generate trust with wary folks of similar backgrounds. And it's especially hard to tell with someone like ChokBar, who looks from a distance like a chic middle aged New Yorker, with vibrant lipstick, trendy blue frames, and a flowing peasant skirt and slimming black blouse, but whose face up close is a mask of disarming kindness and serenity.

"Shamanism is not about intellect or mind," she says. "It is about heart and body."

She goes on to talk about living in the experience and removing our social masks to explore the spirit world with honesty and an open heart. The crowd murmurs while I squirm. I'm all in for trying to strip away biases and see the world from new and hyper-honest perspectives. I'm all for the disintegration of the ego, like ChokBar advocates. But I question whether I'll ever be able to experience what the people around me claim to experience just because of my personal cosmology. Even though I'm not dismissive and like to think of myself as inquisitive and open, maybe the fact that I can't help but try to rationalize and explain everything is a fault somehow.

It gives me a sense of perverse pleasure, then, when ChokBar gives the believers a warning, too:

"Those of you who came with agendas to see power animals, drop it."

Those grasping for experiences probably won't get them, she's implying, or will just get what their minds wish to see and manufacture for themselves. It's a nice rebuke to often overly twee pop-spiritualists.

But it's also a classic shamanism move. It's fairly common, as far as I've seen in my limited experiences, for shamans to argue that because the spirits are in control they can't guarantee anything. If you didn't have a revelation, that's because your heart wasn't open and the spirits could tell, or because the spirits were interested in giving you another experience. The embrace of superhuman, predestined, and erratic agencies is delightfully un-provable, offering the perfect escape valve to forgive disappointments without eroding the faith of those who've come seeking help. It can even push some desperate for experience deeper into shamanic realms.

When ChokBar has finished talking about her experiences with shamanism and offering warnings about how to approach the remainder of the session, I stand with the others for our free dancing. ChokBar dims the lights, turns on some new-agey shamanic soft rock (it sounds a little like she gave a shaman an electric guitar then asked Sigur Rós to mix the results), and asks us to close our eyes and flail our limbs about as the music moves us. So I do, dropping my usual self-consciousness and making all efforts not to peek, checking how the middle aged women sitting on either side of me might now be reliving their 20s in this sanctioned moment of abandon.

After ten minutes, during which I can hear ChokBar shuffling around, but have no idea what she's doing, the music ceases. ChokBar tells us to unroll our yoga mats and lay atop them on our backs in what is essentially shavasana, or corpse pose. She asks us to close our eyes once more, repeating a meaningless silently mantra in our heads to help us push all other thoughts out of our heads as they arise, and begins to pound her drum, slipping in and out of rhythms she says she does not plan or understand. Some people later tell me the music became polyphonic and deafening for them, but to me it was just a constant drone on top of my fleeting thoughts.

At first, I keep thinking of my ex's hands. I'm not sure why, but the memory is very tactile. I can feel her fingers, the way they used to wind about with an insectile fluidity and precision. I push this thought out of my mind again and again because it's not something I want to think about right now. Then I see a wolf just sitting in the black field of my mind, looking at me dully.

If I have a third eye, it probably rolled a few dozen rotations at this. The wolf, especially in Turkic regions like Tuva, is such a cliché shamanic symbol that I think I must have been primed by the situation to think of it, even though I'd never associate myself with a wolf. But then again, it does make a bit of sense. I'm a man who loves to be alone—that's how I know how to live. Yet while I wish to retain my independence, I believe my greatest shortcoming to be my ever-increasing social ineptitude, which drives me to cower in the corner at parties, sometimes fleeing with my heart racing into the safety of some quiet back room. Wolves, it occurs to me, are pack hunters, social at the same time as they are solitary and calm. They are a good manifestation of the things that I wish to change in myself, even if I didn't know it at first.

Afterward, we all arise and speak to each other and ChokBar about our experiences. Most other participants had far more visceral and moving visions than my own, and of far different animals: bears, egrets, and jellyfish, to name a few. I can't help but feel that we were all conditioned to think of animals and then to overlay introspection on top of them unconsciously. I can't help but feel that this energetic experience was just a good way of stripping away some of our inhibitions by convincing us that we were in a safe space beyond the strictures of our own anxieties in the everyday world, allowing us to explore our own needs and fears honestly through symbolism. But when I speak to ChokBar, I don't ask her about this, because I don't want to pop the bubbles of so many people around me, nor do I want to get led around in the circles of shamanic reasoning to come out at a mystical version of my own explanation of this ritual, nor do I feel inclined to pick a fight with a woman who seems so honestly concerned and kind.

Instead, I tell her that I saw a wolf, and that I think I know what this power animal represents, but that I'm not sure how to achieve the confidence that I lack. I ask her if she or any of her spirits know what's standing in my way. She tells me that I don't love myself. And she's right—I know that my distaste for myself, bordering on self-hatred, is at the root of most of my numerous character flaws. I just don't know how to overcome it, and ChokBar has no answers on that point save to give me a line straight from the mouth of Yoda: don't try to love yourself; love yourself.

This doesn't help me all that much. Mainly, I suspect, because I can't believe fully in my experience or in ChokBar, so this insight doesn't land profoundly in my heart and soul. Maybe if I had belief, if I'd been able to inhabit the experience, I'd be able to take this call for self-love onboard and change who I am. But I can't, because I'm now convinced that ChokBar's serenity and flexibility are a mirror. I've always thought that shamanism is the traditional means by which we break down the messy artifices of self and dissect the pieces, taking this deconstruction as a nearly divine experience and so absorbing it wholeheartedly. This experience just confirms it for me.

To those who can embrace it, it's probably more useful than the highly self-aware and self-explaining field of psychology. But to someone like me, it just feels like I'm grasping at potential out of my reach. I feel like I've robbed myself as an avenue for healing through my mild but insistent rationalism. I feel like my loving embrace of modernity may have swindled me out of just as much as it's given me. I feel like maybe ChokBar's living proof that humans need to be tricked, or to be capable of being tricked, with benevolence in order to navigate the world around us. And I really want to know how I can trick myself into a space of action and transformation.

Maybe, I think as I depart the theater to a now darkened and vacant 17th Street, I should look into trying some ayahuasca. I hear that stuff's great at breaking down even the sternest barriers, bringing even the direst skeptics into a purportedly magical spiritual realm. But for now, I'll see what I can to do for myself with the memory of a self-created spirit wolf dancing in my head.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

Vundabar came together in high school, and their first album blossomed out of the sort of friendship that can only really be forged by kids drawn together by adolescent alienation and the general discomfort of being a teenager. Like all great high school bands, they tracked the album on GarageBand with a couple mics and a lot of time on their hands. The finished record, Antics, was surprisingly well-received and even netted them a European tour thanks to an enthusiastic French booking agency.

When Vundabar made it back stateside, they tracked a new album, Gawk, which come out on July 24. The new record was either tracked in a decent studio or the boys have figured out some genius hack to make GarageBand sound incredible. It's a thoughtful, post-punk thing with angular guitars and bleeding with hooks. Today, we're premiering their song "Darla," from the new album. Check it out!

Preorder Gawk here.

Photo via 4th Canadian Ranger Patrol Group

Canadian reservists operating in the far north are set to stop using a World War 2–era rifle based on an 1895 design, due to a lack of spare parts.

Julian Fantino, the associate minister of national defence, announced Tuesday that the government has awarded a contract to replace the Lee-Enfield rifle, a vintage model still used by the Canadian Rangers, with 6,500 new weapons. The Rangers are a sub-unit of the Canadian Armed Forces reserves tasked with asserting Canada's sovereignty in the Arctic and other remote areas.

According to a Defence Ministry press release, the Enfield is still a perfectly suitable rifle for harsh northern conditions. But the phase-out became necessary after the government learned that spare parts are likely to become unavailable by 2017.

Prized for its fast action, the Enfield was once the rifle of choice for Commonwealth countries. It was first produced in 1895 and saw service in the Boer War. Improved models were standard issue for the British army in the First World War and in the Second World War, when Canada equipped its own soldiers with Canadian-made Enfields.

The rifle was phased out by the British in the 1957. Today, it is still used by rural police in Pakistan and occasionally turns up in insurgent weapons caches in conflict zones, including in Afghanistan.

The Rangers' new rifle has not yet been designed. Colt Canada will oversee a competition for design proposals, and has already been selected to manufacture the winning model at its Kitchener plant. The government is aiming to have it ready for testing this summer. A ministry backgrounder on the contract said that the design would have to operate flawlessly under the sub-zero temperatures of the Canadian Arctic.

Follow Arthur White on Twitter.

Delilah, Ursula, and Amelia from Skinny Girl Diet, shot by James A Grant for issue seven.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

If you really sat down and tried, you could turn a lot of pages in the space of 30 days. While we've spent over a decade providing you with about 120 of those pages every month, it turns out there are many more magazines in the world beyond VICE. This new series, "Ink Spots," is a helpful guide on which of those zines, pamphlets, and publications you should be reading when you're not staring at ours.

Nepotism's great and all, but we'd tell you to read Musphit even if one of its two co-founders wasn't Bertie Brandes, former VICE UK Fashion Editor, columnist, and office morale booster. Mushpit is great because it's partly a homage to the teen magazine (problem pages and flow chart quizzes feature heavily), but with a welcome addition of the kind of satire you don't find in the austere landscape of fashion magazines.

Bertie started the magazine in 2011 with best friend and stylist, Char Roberts. Back then, it was a somewhat DIY zine with lots of lo-res pictures of Britney, and liberal use of the Marker Felt font. Now in its seventh issue, Mushpit has truly come of age; Tyrone Lebon shot the cover for the sixth edition, Alice Neale shot the latest, and, I mean, they've finally let me write something for it (which is clearly a key turning point in what will become the history of Mush).

The new issue—"The Sell Out Issue"—hits shelves this Friday. To celebrate that fact, we talked to Bertie and Char about how to bankroll your magazine with a club night, what we can expect from lucky #7 and how we can all avoid being lousy sell-outs in the quest for success.

VICE: Hi Bertie and Char. So, to start, how would you describe Mushpit to anyone in the dark?
Bertie and Char: We've been described as J-17 meets Private Eye, which is very flattering and probably the closest anyone's got to pinning Mushpit down—including us. It's a combination of ridiculous satire, questionable life advice, and fashion and photography from our favorite up-and-comers.

If you like fashion for creativity and not for business, if you think about where stuff comes from and why, if you're interested in sex, love, and beauty—but don't want to be patronized by adverts for "rad swimwear" or anti-wrinkle BB cream—then read Mushpit.

Bertie made this on inDesign, which she's getting really good at.

How did it start?
How all good things start: complaining about the status quo around the kitchen table. We were both testing the waters of working in fashion and were, frankly, bored and a bit underwhelmed. We were in awe of this amazing 90s and 2000s magazine called Cheap Date and decided to take it upon ourselves to make a version for our generation. Mushpit was born in summer of 2011, and we threw parties to fund it, along with spending large chunks of our student loan, which we're obviously never going to pay back—thanks, Dave!

Claudia Sinclair

How has it evolved from issue to issue?
It's evolved in size from the hilarious A5 zines we did until issue five. There's also the biggest amount of content ever in the new issue, which is exciting. The anti-fashion, anti-bullshit, disillusioned sentiment will forever remain the backbone, but we've definitely learned how to take it further and be cleverer about how we start conversations now.

We don't have a rigid structure to how often issues are released, so they each tend to be wildly different. Growing up from 20 to 25 is obviously a really formative time career-wise, and each Mushpit pinpoints another crisis we've had trying to figure out who we are and what we're doing. The last one was "The Confused Issue," and this is "The Sell Out Issue," which says a lot.

Have you figured out how to be slick and cool without selling out yet?
Well, we made it "The Sell Out Issue" because all around us we saw big companies ripping people off, and it was depressing. One of our entire pages once got copied word for word by an evil commercial magazine who shall not be named... yet. We felt like, career-wise, it was suddenly time to sink or swim, but swimming meant getting into bed with brands and ideas that we thought were crap. Why should we? We're over trying to look slick and cool, thank God. Being an absolute mess is much more fun.

Mac DeMarco, shot by Carolina Faruolo.

Who are some of your favorite collaborators?
Tyrone Lebon shooting our last cover story was definitely a "pinch me" moment—and being able to pull Meadham Kirchhoff for it without lying at all was very satisfying. We were definitely squealing down the phone to each other about that.

We always work with Maxwell Tomlinson, who is great, and of course Eloise Parry, who is incredible and an ultimate Mushpit icon; we shot a great story in her hometown, just by Middlesborough, for this issue. We have a pretty close-knit Mush family, so our contributors tend to reappear. We love them all, but some of our favorites include Jonathan Baron, Oliver Hadlee Pearch, Claudia Sinclair, Lotte Andersen, Claire Barrow, and Hanna Moon.

Do you still objectify boys in Mushpit? You've always championed the poster boy centerfold...
Us? Never!

READ: Bertie's gloriously funny VICE column of yesteryear – Pretty Girl Bullshit

Tell us about Big Momma Bruce and your agony aunt.
Big Momma Bruce is Mushpit's no-nonsense guardian angel [and general life-advisor], who has sadly taken a sabbatical from issue seven as she is visiting family abroad. She'll be back next time, don't worry. Harriet Verney is our in-house agony aunt. You know, the one who gave you your first drag on a cigarette behind the loos at a wedding. Don't take her advice—it's terrible!

Shot by Maxwell Tomlinson.

Whose bum is on the new cover, and what else can we expect from inside the new issue?
That glorious bum belongs to Sophia Kelly, a dream goddess who we flew over from Ibiza for just one day because we knew it had to be her on the cover. She arrived from Stansted straight to the shoot, and within ten minutes was sitting topless in our kitchen, smoking organic Ibizan cigarettes and talking about how her dad was stalking her crush on Instagram. She's perfect.

There is also a potentially very lo-fi centerfold, five fashion stories, an Instagram calculator to help you figure out your "what you are worth," and more ridiculous Mushpit content than any sensible person could ever wish for.

Mushpit's Instagram calculator. Bertie actually made this.

Is it more than just a magazine? I heard you have a club night, with vodka slushies?
Mushpit is a global phenomenon, haven't you heard? We're going to overthrow Parliament eventually—we even have our own political party called New Labia (read our full manifesto in the new issue). An anonymous VIP recently sighed into a voddy, lime, and soda at his night—where Mark Ronson was DJing his own music—that our party was "way better than his." There's definitely no guest list at our parties, and no Mark Ronson, either; it's just a place to snog our mates.

Whats your favorite Mush' memory so far?
Definitely not our attempt to have a glam do for the last launch, where we swapped dresses halfway through the night because it was so stressful. Probably just every John Montoya DJ set ever, to be honest. Also shooting our first centerfolds ourselves on Char's dad's digital camera was definitely a highlight. Oh, and it did not objectify boys at all. Just to make that clear. Again.

Mushpit launches this Thursday June 25 at Ditto Press—everyone is welcome and there will be Bacardi Breezers flowing (seriously). The magazine will be available from all cool newsagents you would want to be seen in and online. Follow Mushpit on Twitter and Instagram.

Follow Amelia on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Donald Lee Pardue

Monday afternoon, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley held a press conference to call for the removal of the Confederate flag from state capitol grounds. After her announcement, CNN reports that Walmart and Sears have decided to follow suit and stop selling Confederate flags and merchandise bearing the design from their stores.

As recently as Monday, Walmart's website was shilling the flag and Confederate flag apparel, but they have since been pulled. Sears doesn't sell the flag in its stores, but it promised to remove all gear bearing the flag from both the Sears and Kmart websites.

In a statement to CNN, Walmart spokesman Brian Nick said, "We never want to offend anyone with the products that we offer ... We have a process in place to help lead us to the right decisions when it comes to the merchandise we sell. Still, at times, items make their way into our assortment improperly—this is one of those instances."

That sounds like some evasive business lingo, and it's nuts that the stores didn't get rid of their Confederate flag merchandise much sooner—even Lynyrd Skynyrd stopped using the flag as their logo a few years back—but better late than never.

Want to Read More on VICE.com?

1. White Supremacist Cited in Dylann Roof's Alleged Manifesto Donated to Major GOP Campaigns
2. The Wizard of the Saddle Rides Again
3. Investigating an Unsolved KKK Murder in the Deep South
4. The Black Undercover Cop Who Infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in Colorado

Last August, the Department of Justice released a 79-page report that parsed through the brutality at New York City's Rikers Island, the second-largest jail in America.

After a two-and-a-half-year investigation, US Attorney Preet Bharara's office found that a "deep-seated culture of violence" prevailed on the detention complex, which sits north of Queens. Correction officers were routinely beating inmates, including those who were mentally ill. Use of force complaints had gone widely underreported, and gang violence was out of control. Needless to say, the jail was a civil rights mess, and the report itself came after a class-action lawsuit, Nunez v. City of New York, was filed by the Legal Aid Society and other lawyers in 2012 alleging glaring excesses by guards. (The feds joined the suit in December.)

Since then, Mayor Bill de Blasio, along with his Correction Commissioner Joseph Ponte, has tried to stop the bleeding. He ended solitary confinement for 16- and 17-year-olds, created a new unit for the jail's most violent inmates—which members of the press recently had the chance to tour—and instituted more mental health programs. Still, violence at the jail has continued to make headlines. And the suicide of Kalief Browder—a teenager who was notoriously held at Rikers for three years without trial—has been a black eye for America's largest city.

At a press conference earlier this month, Bharara argued that the mayor's efforts simply were not enough. "Every day that goes by where we don't have enforceable and enduring reform at Rikers Island is one day too many," he said.

That day may have finally arrived.

In a far-reaching settlement announced Monday, NYC reached an agreement with all the parties in the Nunez case, nearly three years from the day it was filed in federal court. In a seven-page letter obtained by Capital New York, the US Attorney's office detailed an array of unprecedented measures that will be implemented in the coming months on Rikers.

At face value, these are easily the most serious reforms aimed at cleaning up the massive jail complex in its bloodstained history.

Use of force complaints will now carry "robust requirements," and a new flagging system will alert staff members to the identities of guards with violent streaks. The guards themselves will also face a tougher hiring process to weed out those with gang affiliations, a move that just preceded Tuesday's New York Daily News investigation finding 112 "red-flagged" guards still holding a job on Rikers. (In January, an NYC Department of Investigation—or DOI—probe found over a third of recent hires had major blotches on their records that should have drawn more scrutiny.)

The settlement also calls for the installation of thousands of new cameras on the island, as well as a pilot program where body cameras will be worn by a number of correction officers (COs) at all times. And solitary will be barred for anyone under the age of 18, as well as for 18-year-olds with major mental health woes.

Then there's appointment of a federal monitor, a position that will be filled by the lawyer Steve J. Martin. He'll be in charge of watching over said reforms' progress, and the effect they have on Rikers's culture. (It's worth noting that both the New York Police Department and Rikers Island will have their own federal monitors, which says something about the state of criminal justice in New York City.)

"Federal prosecutors will remain vigilant to ensure that with a federal monitor, reporting to a federal court, the Constitution protects each and every person within the walls of Rikers Island," Bharara said in a statement.

The head of the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, Vanita Gupta, called the settlement "a model for corrections reform throughout the country."

"For too long, New York City prisoners have suffered dreadful injuries at the hands of staff—fractured facial bones, traumatic brain injuries, internal bleeding—from excessive and sometimes brutal force," Mary Lynne Werlwas, one of the Legal Aid lawyers in the Nunez case, said in a statement. "This agreement seeks to end this culture of violence and bring the City into the mainstream of professional corrections."

According to the New York Times, from here on out, the Department of Correction (DOC) will be required to send "any potential criminal use of force complaint" to the US Attorney's office after passing it along to NYC's own Department of Investigation. This provision was reportedly a matter of debate between the city and the DOJ, and it appears the feds won out in the end.

(VICE has reached out to DOC for comment, but we have yet to hear back.)

Check out the VICE News documentary on the long road to reform at the notoriously violent Salinas Valley State Prison in California.

The deal itself comes as a busy time, both for Rikers and the city. As of Monday night, the city's entire correctional system had been on lockdown, stemming from an outburst of violence on Rikers that included a slashing of three separate inmates, one of which occurred on an inmate transport bus, according to the Times. The settlement is a desperately-needed piece of good news for Mayor de Blasio's criminal justice agenda, and should please his supporters. (Of course, those very some constituents are already pissed that, also on Monday, and after initially opposing the idea, the mayor announced that the city will be adding 1,300 officers to the nation's largest police force.)

Still, the agreement was lauded by de Blasio and Commissioner Ponte as an exhaustive—and much-needed—restructuring of the scariest island in America.

"Today's settlement builds upon the important changes this administration is bringing to our correctional system and reinforces the necessity of Commissioner Ponte's current reforms on Rikers Island," the mayor said in a statement. "We have a moral imperative to ensure every New Yorker in this city's care is treated with decency and respect."

The agreement, which is expected to be formally submitted by the end of the month, must be approved in federal court before it can be implemented.

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Things haven't been going all that well for Justin Trudeau in the last few weeks.

Poll numbers have him running third, a good pace behind the other two parties. He's had candidates resign in frustration over his support of Bill C-51. He's had trouble carving out a niche between Thomas Mulcair and Stephen Harper.

His announcement last week was supposed to change the channel. Trudeau unveiled a suite of reforms intended to tune up Canada's democratic institutions. Everything from allowing his MPs to vote freely on most legislation, to axing the first-past-the-post voting system and making his own office subject to access-to-information legislation.

We sat down with Trudeau to talk about whether that's just nice language, or whether it's something more concrete.