Various Artists: Skull Disco: Soundboy Punishments

A now-sound in those parts of London still haunted

by the ghosts of old jungle and drum 'n' bass, dubstep sounds like a musical

mode made for a ravey sort of wake. Dubstep artists on the Skull Disco label's

two-disc compilation Soundboy Punishments favor sparseness over density, homing in on

isolated drum sounds and letting suggestion take over from there: On "Girder,"

the producer known as Appleblim crams lots of little taps and reverberations

into a soundscape marked by reedy breaths blown back from old Jamaican dub

reggae, but the dominant factor remains its expansive sense of space. In "New

Dawn," Shackleton enlists weird yelps and breaches of noise in what starts out

like a dream but moves into the realm of nightmare. A revealing highlight of

the set comes by way of Ricardo Villalobos, a techno artist whose chilling

20-minute remix of Shackleton's "Blood On My Hands" meditates on the paralysis

and action latent in a sound that traffics in a choked-up language of heaves

and sighs.