Recently a sceptical but opened-eared acquaintance was asking for starting points, ‘ways into’ dubstep. A friend offered a quick-fire one-word answer: “Shackleton”. As a recommendation that’s possibly more than a little misleading. Even if we elevate the producer to the status of maverick, it probably shouldn’t be in relationship to a form he’s increasingly distanced from musically (and geographically). This is not the music of a genre outsider, more the work of a loner.

When this Lancashire-born wanderer first crossed paths with the emergent darker and dubbier forms of post-2step garage at London’s FWD>> night, it was clearly a galvanising encounter – prompting the formation of the Skull Disco label alongside Appleblim – but Shackleton’s own resulting output has never been imbued with the approach of either a joiner or a hijacker. He moulded tracks around the 140 BPM mark in the hope DJs might play them out, but beyond that he’s made very few concessions to genre specifics.

In an interview with Martin “Blackdown” Clark a few years ago, Shackleton was reminded how he and his cohorts were always the ones dancing vigorously up front at FWD>>, during a period when grave faces and head nodding were more de rigueur. This fidgety urge to “rock out” with a lack of self-consciousness betrays a punk background and has made a palpable mark on the way Shackleton constructs his music. While he confesses to indulging in a “boring” process of painstakingly editing and tweaking drum hits, the end result of that work is, more often than not, hyperkinetic.

Of course, this hyperkinesis, the spasmodic yet controlled bursts of rhythm, is something he shares with the jerky swing of 2step and, to step back further, jungle, but the subtle differences in timbre and application are key. While the basslines generally have the low-end resonance common to the UK bass continuum, they frequently gallop along, techno or rock-like, supporting and driving the trademark hand percussion but rarely getting full-on funky. Here, bass is largely employed as a steady guide on a journey rather than for bomb-dropping dynamics and rhythmic surprises.

And so to that percussion, the ‘tribal’ rhythms Shackleton is best known for, and which form the brittle spine of this mix, composed entirely of his own re-edited and unreleased tracks. While these drums might superficially connote distant tribes in far off and, significantly, warm environs, their use here points us to no real place. The rattling, snaking rhythms are every bit as at home underpinning fearful disembodied Western voices (‘Negative Thoughts’, ‘Closeness To Nature’, ‘Massacre’) as they are accompanying a muezzin’s holy incantations on the classic ‘Hypno Angel’. Processed so precisely and weaving in among cloudy chords and the most stark and pointed of melodies, the atmosphere they inhabit is definitely a pretty chilly one.

In this sonic fiction the signifiers are disparate and out of whack. The distinctly urban (or at least suburban) flavour of bass dread found in the music of Shackleton’s sometime heroes Digital Mystikz is conspicuously absent. Likewise the rainy London nights of Burial’s haunted rave are not the kind of easy evocations we’re dealing with. This tightly woven narrative/ritual takes place somewhere completely other, impossible to pinpoint.

Yet the labyrinthine paths of the music itself are meticulously mapped making them, perhaps paradoxically, the perfect elements for a mix. There’s nothing here that begs for a rewind, there are few sharp increases in intensity, no exhortations to get higher. No, here every track shift leads not towards the light, but round another corner of the maze. Breakdowns go on for minutes at a time suspending the drama that unfolds slowly and seemingly endlessly. And when things finally get as frantic and furious as they will on closer ‘Stripped’, everything suddenly falls away leaving little more than a voice intoning a solemn “and let go…and let go. Again.” Masterful.

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