The track “Half Silver” by Aaron Spectre provides a glimpse at the lighter side of dubstep. He’s posted the free download (MP3) as a teaser for his recent Lost Tracks collection (Ad Noiseam), which follows up last year’s Grist. Grist was released under his pseudonym, Drumcorps; it threaded scraps of heavy metal (familiar riffs, genre-staple textures, off-the-beat masses of percussion) through latter day drum’n’bass (stop’n’go rhythms, cavernous echo), a combination that falls under the broader rubric “dubstep.”
For “Half Silver,” Spectre takes many common measures of Grist and drops them by half: speed, density, darkness. The result is a willfully tenuous beat and a sliver of a melody. Listen about two and a half minutes in, as he introduces this super-rudimentary scratching, which sounds like turntablism enacted on an old steam pipe. When posting the track, he listed its constituent parts as follows: “Dulcimer, electronics and space.” The Lost Tracks collection also features collaborations with Aarktica, Kazumi and Lapsed. More info at virb.com/aaronspectre and drumcorps.cc.