Hyetal: A Bristol basshead uses Cocteau Twins to confront his dubstep-heavy past.
It’s easy to think of dubstep as its own fully evolved form, as though the off-kilter child of drum & bass and 2-step garage was born in one epic bass drop, written in Platonic form as an unchanging genre forever. But like any well-defined and exciting sub-genre, dubstep now exists in many forms apart from standard bass wobble orthodoxy, be it super-producer’s album tracks for artists as mainstream as Rihanna or newer, more experimental sounds that simply bare its traces. Count Bristol resident David Corney (a.k.a. Hyetal) among that last group, as a young producer who came up in the midst of the nascent dubstep scene, and has evolved from releasing unique genre singles to a fully realized artist album, Broadcast. He seemingly aims to define a new space in which John Carpenter scores his films with rattletrap synthesizers and dim, throbbing percussion.
Corney’s musical evolution started out in Southampton. He began exploring rock music, but when hip-hop took hold of him, it revealed a new means of production. "I bought an Akai MPC," he explains. "I really studied it and tried to do [hip-hop production] as authentically as I could. I&apos;d get original pressings of breaks and would then sample straight from the turntable into the MPC."
In the midst of this, a move to Bristol to study music and film at university (“I was a mature student,” he says with an easy laugh) put him into one of the UK’s most influential musical hotspots. “The music scene here is amazing really: hip-hop was happening and some early drum & bass simultaneously. The whole dubstep scene, that&apos;s a lot of people&apos;s roots, in jungle and drum & bass,” he offers. Though he heard various dance genres in the Bristol clubs, Corney found the rough-and-tumble energy of dubstep irresistible. “The other music was fun and inspiring in that it was my first experience of dance music clubs," he admits, "but I didn&apos;t listen to the records at home in the way I did with dubstep... It was tangible here, people working in record shops and playing in clubs, and all were people who were easily reached.” With that bit of production experience already under his belt, Corney became Hyetal (which means “of or pertaining to rainfall”) and dove headfirst into dubstep.
Early singles like “Gold or Soul,” built on a solid foundation of low-end thump and perfectly stepped percussion, hypnotized the punters with classic club-friendly peaks and valleys, allowing him to sneak in little personal touches like micro-samples of soulful house vocalists and interstitial videogame-style blips. “The Last Time We Spoke” incorporated the hallmark wobbly bass stabs and lazer-etched percussion of dubstep, but eased up the BPM to near-techno territory, and the strobed synths piled on later hinted at full-on acid-house abandon. DJ gigs followed, escalating from sporadic to regular, and though Corney initially shied away from incorporating too many Hyetal tracks, his sets showed the range of his ear—and allowed him to avoid a day job so that he could DJ and produce full-time.
This kind of collaborative scene seems to rise up in Bristol once a decade or so—recall the early Wild Bunch years of trip-hop, when groups like Massive Attack and Portishead (whom Corney cites as a major influence as well) shared a free flow of ideas and members. But then as now, a scene can harden into a set of rules, especially when one week’s singles sometimes seem to only echo and restate the previous week&apos;s.
That disregard for rules permeates Hyetal’s first album, the recently released Broadcast. The opener, “Ritual,” features massive, ominous washes drifting in ambient space, recalling the soundtrack work of Vangelis and Tangerine Dream. Guest Alison Garner adds wistful, whispery vocals to “Diamond Islands” and closer “Black Black Black.” The tempo speeds up in the midsection, with the defiantly artificial percussion of “Beach Scene” recalling early electronic pop like New Order. The pulsating synths of “The Chase” provide a mid-album return to future-noir landscape, and then “Searchlight” uncovers a warehouse in which house of both the Chicago and glitch flavors are reunited by a traditional song structure.
Broadcast is out now on Black Acre.
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