Sometimes you’ve got to go backward to go forward. When the Tectonic label was founded by Rob Ellis, aka DJ Pinch, in 2005 it marked an important step forward for the then-minuscule dubstep scene. Along with Pinch’s dance night Subloaded, it marked Bristol as dubstep’s Second City — just after the South London suburb of Croydon where the sound first emerged in the early ‘00s as a deeper, more DJ-focused first cousin to grime. Bristol, of course, had a long history of experimental soundsystem music, as its large Caribbean population influenced punks and ravers, and was vital in the evolution of jungle, trip-hop, and so on. It was natural that a sound initially focused on pure subsonic bass should take root there.

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