Skull Disco: Dystopian beats

Headbusting, cranium crunching, cerebellum cauterizing - that's the output of ostensible dubstep label Skull Disco, now defunct after only a handful of releases. And yet, in only a few slow, quiet but immensely menacing releases, they've utterly altered the musical landscape of UK bass culture and beyond.

Skull Disco is the most potent musical vision of a dark future we've witnessed thus far, where swooping phantasms of malevolent machinery skim over our heads, the ghosts of disquiet never far behind. Skull Disco's trick - and the name evokes, quite literally, our synaptic connections dancing and pinging back and forth, such are the audio hallucinations they conjure - is to make this darkness compelling, utterly immersive, and even spine tinglingly beautiful.

Perfectly capturing the malaise that currently enshrouds the globe, tracks by only a handful of artists - Appleblim, Shackleton and Gatekeeper - combine a string of cultural signifiers in bizarre and gob smacking new ways.

Dubwise echoes, samples of dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, 'Mentasm' hoovers, hardcore synth stabs are placed in an unfamiliar, fearful context. Shackleton's 'Hamas Rule' is extraordinary - an Arabesque procession of clicks and Middle Eastern drum hits, and the occasional Oriental melody, but charged with disquiet, evoking an uneasy peace before the next barrage of weaponry and all the more chilling in the current climate of war between Hamas' Gaza and Israel.

Appleblim's 'Fear' is prickles of cold sweat forming on the back of your neck, immense cityblock demolishing waves of bass summoned from the Earth, riding a slow, entropic beat, as Kwesi Johnson issues his ghostly warning of incipient tension: 'Madness tight in the heads of the rebels", evil blades of '97 vintage tech step synths cutting through the track.

Shackleton's 'Blood On My Hands' bears the same blueprint of 'Hamas Rule', but instead coasts on barely there Oriental percussion, and barely audible spoken word intonations beneath, as spectral keys crystallize into being.

Their first compilation, 'Soundboy Punishments', on which these tracks appear, is the perfect entry point, and a gateway into a new sonic portal, but 'Soundboy's Gravestone Descecrated by Vandals' similarly explores their compellingly twisted logic and narratives of UK bass gothic. The titles themselves place Skull Disco in the distinguished lineage of soundsystem crushing dub culture, referencing the 'soundboy murder' exhortations of dancehall and junglist toasters. Let the music into your skull and leave its indelible mark.