Kode9 is Steven Goodman. Goodman is a Scot, holds a PhD in
philosophy, and owns the dubstep label Hyperdub. The star of this label
is, of course, Burial, and the first record the label released, in
2004, was Burial’s EP South London Boroughs. Kode9’s entrance
into the record business is an affirmation of the urban, both its
living (rail transportation, pirate radio signals) and its dead
(ghostly calls from graveyards behind crumbling cathedrals). On April
4, 2006, Kode9 presented a mix of his label’s first major release,
Burial’s self-titled first album, on the BBC One radio program
Breezeblock, which is hosted by the queen of the dubstep
movement, Mary Anne Hobbs.
That numinous moment (consisting of a 21-minute mix) marked for many
the birth of a new sound, a new beat, and a new direction in music. In
the way that the Communist Manifesto announced that a specter
haunted 19th-century Europe (“the specter of communism”), Kode9’s
Breezeblock mix announced a specter haunting 21st-century London
(the specter of Burial). After the clearing of a crackling cloud of
alien transmissions, buzzing telecommunication equipment, and digital
dub drones, there emerged the metallic momentum of an underground beat,
which, after a few minutes, was faded out and replaced with a call for
peace by holographic angels. Then came the wisdom of a jaded hit man
(“we got to stick to the old-school ways”), the longings of a
heartbroken Rasta (“my love, my love, my love”), and the spectacle of
giants rising from the depths of the Thames and marching across the
city. The groundbreaking mix presented a postindustrial version of
William Blake’s preindustrial 18th-century poem “London” (“Near where
the charter’d Thames does flow/And mark in every face I meet/Marks of
weakness, marks of woe”).
In 2006, Kode9 properly introduced Spaceape, a dub poet, on his
first CD, Memories of the Future. If Tricky in the 1990s was the
Bob Marley for a generation that no longer believed in the promises
made by the black-power and liberation movements of the 1960s and
1970s, Spaceape is the Linton Kwesi Johnson for an age that is still
angry about racism and exploitation of the poor but can no longer
express these feelings clearly. Despite Johnson’s thick Jamaican
accent, he was understandable: He directly denounced police brutality,
mourned the death of his hardworking father (“you fight a good fight,
but the game was fixed”), and scandalized Rastafarians by declaring
this was “the age of science and technology.” Spaceape not only has a
thick Jamaican accent, he also grumbles and mumbles every word into
sinister obscurity. On “Ghost Town,” he manages to make the Specials’
easily understood song of the same name too difficult to grasp.
Kode9 also participated in the soundtrack for the only important
science-fiction movie of the decade, Children of Men—his
“totalitarian dub,” as the Dummy blog calls it,
reinforced the film’s mood of total, unremitting dread (the people of
this future are daily approaching the extinction of mankind). But the
darkness of Kode9’s music and mixes, his hauntology, as critics
such as Simon Reynolds call it, is not about death as such or the end
of the world but about living in a world that has died. This is the
meaning of his and Spaceape’s warped/dubbed/surreal/minimal version of
Prince’s “Sign o’ the Times.” When Prince recorded the tune in the
mid-1980s, he lived in a world that was still alive. Spaceape, on the
other hand, lives in world that is no longer creative, productive, or
vital. This type of life—life after death—makes ghosts of
the living. Those who breathe, whose hearts beat and bones burn with
the desire to survive, they are the phantoms in what Slavoj Zizek calls
“the [devastated] desert of the real.”
Finally, Kode9 has so far contributed one track, “Nine Samurai,”
to what the future will recognize as a part of dubstep’s canon alongside
tracks by artists like Skream, Benga, Digital Mystikz, and Loefah. The
combination of its tragically heroic horns, aggressive congas, and
digitally distorted bass fragments offers something of an anthem for
the melancholy spirit of dubstep. Kode9’s music lacks those moments of
sweetness that always bring a little light to Burial’s “dark side,” but
his musical program remains one of the most distinct and intelligent in
the current world of electronic music. 
