Scuba DJ-KicksThe one thing that Paul Rose, better known as Scuba, really doesn’t want you to do is to try and pin him down. His roots are in London’s dubstep scene, but he lives in the techno metropolis of Berlin. His music is located at some unspecified point between those two cities – bass heavy, sparse, full of atmosphere and with propulsive rhythms, but above all impossible to define. His label, Hotflush, is one of dubstep’s spiritual homes, with releases by Distance, Benga and Mount Kimbie, but it also has that hard-to-categorize quality Warp had in the ’90s. He is, in a word, a maverick.

No surprise, then, that his DJ-Kicks mix resists pigeon-holing. A mind-bending 32-track journey, it ranges from the doom-laden ambience of “HF029B2” by Sigha, to the stripped down squelches and bleeps of “Acid Battery” by Boddika and the muted keys of Jichael Mackson’s “Gedons.” It’s deep, a set that engages your mind as well as your feet. “It’s loosely based around the last couple of sets I’ve played at my club night, Sub:Stance, at Berghain in Berlin,” explains Rose. “It’s the last set of the night. It’s longer than the other sets. We tend to have lots of people playing for 90 minutes. But the last set is at least three hours or more, so you have more freedom. It’s really varied. You can play more or less anything and people will stay with you. That’s so special. A key thing I’ve been doing in those sets is starting off faster, say 138, and slowing down. It’s really gradual, slowing each tune down a little bit. The idea was to condense that three hour set into an hour. It drops about 12 bpm over the hour, from 136 to 124. Each tune is a little bit slower. I don’t like mixes that jump around, I prefer things to flow.”

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