Paul Dickow, best known as the Portland, Oregon, electronic musician Strategy, once sent a demo to a European dance-music imprint, and the Europeans liked it—they just wanted it a little cleaner, tighter, more professional sounding. Problem was, Dickow liked to record on a ragtag setup of borrowed or busted gear, jamming live straight to two-track stereo. He didn’t have a high-end audio interface; it would have been impossible to edit the muck out of his tracks even if he’d wanted to. But eventually he realized that dance music—even the most crowd-pleasing, floor-filling dance music—needs to have something a little bit wrong with it. “That’s what’s great about well-done yucky music,” he told Resident Advisor. “You’re like, ‘Fuck! It sounds so fucked up and I keep listening to it, I can’t tune it out.’” Science bore this out, he reasoned: The ear is attuned to imperfection. “We map sound by what’s wrong,” he said. “If it’s fucked up and it has a hook, then you have this delicious problem, and that’s where I think I live.”
For more than 20 years, Dickow has been exploring different shades of wrongness in his music, finding delicious problems in loose-limbed house jams, intransigent rave anthems, and ambient nodders that sound like they’ve been stewing in battery acid. On Graffiti in Space, Dickow turns his ear for imperfection toward dub techno. It’s an audacious proposition, if only because dub techno is so often treated as a color-by-numbers exercise; it’s among dance music’s most formulaic styles. Berlin duo Basic Channel perfected the form almost as soon as they had pioneered it, and three decades later, it’s less a living genre than a museum piece. But where most latter-day dub techno is vaporous, billowing, and virtually friction-free, Dickow digs gleefully into the gunk.
The opening “Remote Dub” has all the hallmarks of the style: pulsing minor chords, plunging dub bassline, metronomic beat. Filters yawn open and closed around a hazy ostinato wash. The mood is somewhere between gently narcotic and pleasantly narcoleptic. But the texture is classic Strategy—soft and sticky as a bag of candy on the dashboard. All six tracks on the 41-minute album have a similarly damaged patina. Dickow is fond of building his own effects units—compressor pedals, spring reverb—and it sounds like it; you can practically smell the globs of solder sizzling between the notes. “Fountain of Youth” opens with metallic wisps twisting over a loud electrical hum, and the atmosphere is periodically punctuated by laser-zapping feedback squeals. The elements sound like they’re competing for space on the tape: Every time that shrill siren comes through, it seems to suck up all the air in the room. But it’s also a viscerally powerful track, with a cascading dub bassline that threatens to flood the mix.