After the widely acclaimed Burial debut album, Hyperdub throw out another tangential long player, a mutant satellite to the grime/dubstep scenes, this time from label boss Kode9 and resident vocalist Spaceape. Memories of the Future features 14 dread filled flash-backs and flash-forwards from a world trembling in an echology of fear. The future has collapsed in on the present and spaceship earth is on route to nowhere. The album brings together the long sought after Hyperdub debut single 'Sine of the Dub' from early 2004 with other minor classics such as 'Kingstown', recent singles 'Backward' and '9 Samurai' and 10 new tracks of uneasy, sometimes queasy listening. Time scrambling dubtronic poet, Spaceape circulates around the lyrical black hole he calls home with tales of cultural addiction, urban paralysis, bioterror, smoldering flesh and psycho-affective meltdown. Yet they manage to conjure up a strange joy in these hallucinations of dystopia which infect the real present. ‘Glass’ eases you into a false sense of insecurity, a synthetic sea shanty for a spaceship adrift. ‘Victims’ descends down through the dub chamber and resurfaces towards the 'dread pop' of ‘Curious’(featuring debut appearance from Ms.Haptic), and the ‘dread hop’ of ‘Backward’ and ‘Portal’. Spaceape’s dark dictations and demented refrains form the consistent thread through 9’s loping rhythms, deranged melodies and walls of muffled, driving sub-bass. Alongside the singularly infamous 'Sine' are more doses of uniquely sticky, claustrophobic and katatonic bass poetry of 'Nine' and 'Correction'. The album closes with the cold shiver of ‘Lime’ and astro-dancehall of ‘Quantum’. But as Spaceape reminds us in ‘Glass’ – “It’s the beginning, not the end,
that we have to reach last.”
