Ranked list
The 10 Best Dub Techno Albums
Dub techno as the Berlin lineage and its descendants: chord stabs fed through delay until the source disappears, Basic Channel and Chain Reaction, the Michigan wing that answered them, and the producers still working the form now. A record qualifies when the processing is the composition rather than an effect applied on top of one. Techno and ambient are ranked elsewhere and this list shares records with both. From 1993 to now.
The method is almost embarrassingly simple. Play a chord, send it through a delay unit and a spring reverb, turn the original down until only the echoes remain, and repeat for eight minutes. Moritz von Oswald and Mark Ernestus worked it out in Berlin in 1993 with a handful of twelve-inch records and a mixing desk treated as an instrument, and thirty years later people are still finding new things inside it.
What made it more than a technique was the timing. Berlin had space and cheap rent and a techno scene arguing with itself, and Basic Channel pointed the argument at Jamaica: dub's idea that the mix is the composition, applied to a four-four pulse. Chain Reaction turned that into a school. Porter Ricks brought hydrophones, Vainqueur brought patience, Fluxion brought warmer water, and Monolake brought an engineer who would go on to co-write Ableton Live.
It is also the most forgiving genre here, which is a compliment and a warning. Anyone can make something passable with a delay and a Rhodes chord, and a great deal of very boring music has been made doing exactly that. The ten below are the ones where something is happening underneath the reverb.
The ten
- Number 1 on The 10 Best Dub Techno Albums
Basic Channel — BCD1995Collected works
№ 20 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century
The origin. Von Oswald and Ernestus turning a mixing desk into an instrument and inventing a genre without appearing to try. Thirty years of imitation and almost none of it comes close.
Why it is number one
A handful of twelve-inch records pressed between 1993 and 1995, a shop called Hard Wax, and no interviews. Basic Channel never wrote an album, so the CD that gathers those sides is the only form in which the music exists as a listening object, and it wins anyway. Nothing else in this tradition combines severity and warmth like this: chords arriving as pressure rather than notes, tracks that behave like weather systems, and a low end that makes speakers sound like they are describing a room rather than filling one. Every record below it is in some sense a response.
- Number 2 on The 10 Best Dub Techno Albums
Porter Ricks — Biokinetics1996
№ 102 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century
Hydrophones, harbour noise and Chain Reaction's reverb, assembled into something closer to a body of water than a record. Köner came from sound art and Mellwig from engineering, and the combination has never been repeated.
- Number 3 on The 10 Best Dub Techno Albums
Vladislav Delay — Multila2000Collected works
№ 108 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century
Dub techno left to decompose in real time. Ripatti trained as a jazz drummer, which is why nothing here sits where you expect it, and the whole record moves like weather over Finland.
- Number 4 on The 10 Best Dub Techno Albums
DeepChord Presents Echospace — The Coldest Season2007
Modell and Hitchell together, and the record that proved the American wing could do more than admire Berlin. Two hours of snow, static and buried chords, and the most complete album-scale statement anyone has made in this form since Basic Channel stopped.
- Number 5 on The 10 Best Dub Techno Albums
Maurizio — M-Series1997Collected works
№ 103 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century
The most reduced version of the idea anyone has managed. Two chords, an enormous amount of space, and editing so disciplined it is the entire achievement. Gathered from sides that were never issued otherwise.
- Number 6 on The 10 Best Dub Techno Albums
Monolake — Hongkong1997
№ 134 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century
Robert Henke and Gerhard Behles before Ableton, treating the city as source material. Precision engineering with genuine humidity in it, and the record that proved the Berlin method could travel.
- Number 7 on The 10 Best Dub Techno Albums
Vainqueur — Elevations1997Collected works
№ 113 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century
René Löwe working at Hard Wax alongside the founders and cutting the purest thing in the catalogue. Two chords, enormous patience, and a record that rewards being left running for its whole length.
- Number 8 on The 10 Best Dub Techno Albums
Rhythm & Sound — Rhythm & Sound2001Collected works
№ 66 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century
The founders going all the way into dub, with Jamaican vocalists over the versions. It gave the project a lineage rather than merely a sound, and it is the warmest thing either man made.
- Number 9 on The 10 Best Dub Techno Albums
Fluxion — Vibrant Forms1999Collected works
№ 122 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century
Chain Reaction's Greek outpost, stretching the form toward warmer water. Soublis found a melodic register the Berlin school mostly avoided, and the record is more generous for it.
- Number 10 on The 10 Best Dub Techno Albums
Shinichi Atobe — World2016
№ 114 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century
The Chain Reaction ghost who released once in 2001 and vanished for thirteen years until Demdike Stare found him. Offhand, strange, and unimprovable in a way that makes the more effortful records here sound like they are trying.
Eleven to twenty
Ranked, and held to the same rules as the ten.
- Number 11 on The 10 Best Dub Techno Albums
DeepChord — Sommer2012
№ 48 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century
Rod Modell alone, layering city noise until the source dissolves. Detroit humidity poured over Berlin foundations.
- Number 12 on The 10 Best Dub Techno Albums
Monolake — Gravity2001
№ 40 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century
Berlin reduced to pressure and mist, and Henke at his most architectural. A shade colder than Hongkong.
- Number 13 on The 10 Best Dub Techno Albums
Andy Stott — Luxury Problems2012
№ 18 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century
The form dragged somewhere else entirely: slowed to a crawl, packed in tape mud, built around Alison Skidmore's voice. Stretches the definition and a decade of producers followed it there.
- Number 14 on The 10 Best Dub Techno Albums
Intrusion — The Seduction of Silence2009
№ 159 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century
Stephen Hitchell in Michigan pointing everything at Berlin. Echo science that makes no concession to impatience.
- Number 15 on The 10 Best Dub Techno Albums
Pole — 11998
№ 108 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century
A broken Waldorf filter that clicked instead of filtering, turned into a language. Sits between this list and glitch.
- Number 16 on The 10 Best Dub Techno Albums
Convextion — 28452016
№ 195 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century
Gerard Hanson's thirteen-year gap, and worth every one of them. Space music with Detroit's soul and an engineer's ear.
- Number 17 on The 10 Best Dub Techno Albums
Fluxion — Vibrant Forms II2000
№ 76 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century
The sequel, a year later and across the century line. Slightly rougher water and nearly as good.
- Number 18 on The 10 Best Dub Techno Albums
Porter Ricks — Anguilla Electrica2017
№ 93 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century
Twenty-one years after Biokinetics and recognisably still underwater. Almost no other reunion in this canon works.
- Number 19 on The 10 Best Dub Techno Albums
Yagya — Rhythm of Snow2002
№ 224 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century
One idea followed through for an hour, which reads as monotony or devotion depending on the day. Iceland's contribution.
- Number 20 on The 10 Best Dub Techno Albums
Bandulu — Guidance1993
№ 203 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century
London running Basic Channel's ideas through a soundsystem chassis. Warmer and more political than its Berlin cousins.
Near misses
Records considered and not ranked, with the reason each fell short.
Basic Channel — BCD-2
The second collection, and for some people the better one. BCD carries the earlier and more consequential sides.
Rod Modell — Incense & Black Light
The DeepChord principal under his own name, at his slowest. The Echospace records say it with more weight.
Moritz von Oswald Trio — Fetch
Von Oswald returning with live players and jazz instincts. A different project rather than a late entry in this one.
Gas — Pop
Ambient techno in a forest rather than dub techno in a city. It ranks ninth on the ambient list and tenth on the 21st-century canon.
№ 10 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century · № 9 on The 10 Best Ambient Albums
Swayzak — Himawari
London's dubbed-out tech house, closer to a night bus than to Berlin. Quietly influential on the minimal decade.
Shed — Shedding the Past
Rave memory rather than dub method, and it belongs on the techno list where it already sits. Shares the shelf, not the tradition.
№ 105 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century · № 13 on The 10 Best Techno Albums
How this list was built
Ten from 51 records considered, one of the two smallest fields here. Dub techno is a producer's genre with a deep twelve-inch catalogue and a narrow album one, and a longer list would have meant ranking records nobody wrote as records.
Six of these ten gather twelve-inch sides rather than being written as albums, including the record at number one. That is not a lapse in the rules; it is what this genre is. Basic Channel, Maurizio, Vainqueur, Fluxion and Rhythm & Sound never made albums in the ordinary sense, and the CDs that collect their sides are the only form in which the music exists as something you can sit down with. A rule written to keep DJ mixes and hits packages out would, applied without thought here, delete the entire tradition. Applied with thought, it still keeps out everything it was built to keep out.
Every dub techno record on this site, ranked within its own canon rather than against each other, is on the dub techno genre page.