Last week on the Singles Jukebox, a review site I contribute to, UK critic Mark Sinker threw out the term "dungstep," which Guardian contributor Alex Macpherson picked up to describe the frat-boy bass-blurt of Caspa and Rusko. These post-Âdubstep records go in the opposite directionâthey're closer to headphone IDM than brock-out bangers.
A nascent poster boy for this field, James Blake's CMYK EP (R&S) gurgles rather than stomps, its title track smearing Aaliyah's "Are You That Somebody?" over airy rhythmic fizz, while "I'll Stay" chops simple guitar and contrasting male-female vocal snippets over a beat that's more implied than stated outright. Actress's "Paint, Straw and Bubbles"/"Maze (Long Version)" (Honest Jon's) lines up alongside Blake sonically but is less austere: The A-side sounds like gravel bubbling while the B is built on nagging, haunted-house synth-bass. Ikonika's "Idiot (Altered Natives Remix)" (Hyperdub) steps livelier thanks to zapping 16-bit analog synths and a goosier beatâa Game Boy soundtrack gone oddly elegiac. Americans are starting to get in on this as wellâPhiladelphia's Starkey, most famously, though the hard, hiphop-touched swirl of the Dasein EP (Opit) makes Kentucky's Milyoo worth rooting for, too. (Kentucky was a secret U.S. stronghold of 1990s jungle, so Milyoo's locale isn't too surprising.)
Remixes have always been where producers get loose, and the new breed is no different. Mount Kimbie's Remixes Pt. 1 EP (Hotflush) feels like limbs being stretched: James Blake's rework of "Maybes" soars higher than his own EP, FaltyDL dubs "Serged" into a ghost town, and Instra:mental's bright 4/4 tweak of "At Least" could be retitled "Berlin 3 am." I actually prefer Applescal's A Mishmash of Changing Moods Remixes EP (Traum Schallplatten) to its namesake album: There's more presence in Nuno dos Santos's soft, keyboard-driven remix of "Black Spirals," and Applescal's own grinding organ dub of same, than in the original, and Umbral's remix of "Her Foreverness" does the grainy, soft-focus sorta-house thing right.
You want art-fucky? Say hello to 10-20's Mountain and Isthmus EPs (Highpoint Lowlife). The jagged density of the former seems, appropriately, to have been shaped by natural forces, though "Majik" has a brutally human touch; on the latter, conspicuously dubsteppy tropes (clanking sideways beats, synth blobs, ghostly vox) are wrung out and made alien. Yum. T++'s Wireless EP (Honest Jon's) is straighter, but only marginally. Voices and found sounds alike come through disorienting rhythms as if through shortwave. Call it "muckstep." 
