BAG BOYS Kode9 and Spaceape take the anticelebrity thing a bit too far.

Photo: Courtesy of Forced Exposure

Throbbing speaker bins pump out crispy-fried bass, teched-out synth gurgles, bongos bathed in echo, snippets of Jamaican toasting, chopped start-stop break beats—all at a human clip that invites shoulder pumping, full-body motion or just a massive skunk-smoking session.

Dubstep isn’t easily defined, but the best thing to come out of south London’s clubs in the past few years has finally got its grip on Chicago. This week is a good one for dubstep fans, as one of the genre’s major players, Kode9, hits Sonotheque, and the monthly BassGoesBoom at Lava turns to regional talent in the genre. And a new monthly at Café Lura called DubFix is scheduled for the third Fridays of the month. So, what the hell is it, this dubstep?

Techy dub music—which counts heavies like Adrian Sherwood, the Mad Professor and Rhythm & Sound in its corner—has a long history. In South London, historically a hotbed for dub, jungle and various offshoots of Jamaican music, the moody, anti-commercial sound grew from two-step and U.K. garage. Many pinpoint dubstep’s origins to a record shop, Big Apple Records in the Croydon, where experimentally minded producers/DJs such as Skream and Digital Mystikz congregated. London dubstep events such as Forward>> and DMZ became legendary for incubating and exposing the futuristic, bit-of-everything style.

By 2006, the sound of moody, shuffling 140bpm techy dub was on BBC radio and ready to break out of England. Now, via Internet radio (subfm.com covers the U.K. scene) and downloadable mixes, dubstep has made the Atlantic jump.

In the States, Baltimore’s DJ Joe Nice is the best-known champion of the sound—spinning vinyl at bicoastal dubstep nights such as New York’s Dubwar. Supposedly, Nice has dubplates cut for him in London. He’s “plugged into that London old-boys’ network,” says Chicago DJ Phaded. But stateside, because of the high cost of vinyl and scarcity of speciality record shops, dubstep has a digital flavor. Most American dubstep DJs spin digital files from Serato setups. Since 2006, most new dubstep releases have been for sale as downloads.

Lava’s monthly BassGoesBoom is Chicago’s most consistent dubstep night. Founded by Four/4 (Mike Brunner) and Timid (Tim Arendt), it’s called the first dubstep night in Chicago—though, in fact, drum ’n’ bass lovers BassByThePound had tried dubstep nights at Café Lura before Lava. Brunner has left Chicago, but Arendt fell for dubstep in Madison, Wisconsin, when Abbot, a guest on his Internet radio show at Destroyer.net, let fly with “The Knowledge” by Toasty. He was instantly converted.

“I used to describe dubstep as drum ’n’ bass on heroin, because most of the tunes I was hearing were the half-time stuff that sound almost like hip-hop without the rapping,” Arendt says. But there’s a difference in the overall shape of the music. Dubstep is characterized by a “wobble” from a low frequency tied to a filter cutout. Turns out that wub-wub and the cavernous sub bass is more defining than a particular rhythm—midwestdubstep.com’s discussion board is called “wub talk.” Dubstep can, at times, sound like electro or techno with the bass on steroids. “There are even tunes out now that sound like metal using samples of screaming vocals, face-melting guitar riffs and pummeling beats,” Arendt says. The best definition might be found on Joe Nice’s MySpace page: “Dubstep = Bass + pace + space.”

Phaded, 33, of Wicker Park, sees this year as a make-or-break period for dubstep. On the upside, he notes that “dubstep has a lot more crossover points” than other genres. It can attract new fans from minimal techno and experimental hip-hop. But when jungle exploded in the ’90s, it capitalized on the overspill from the rave scene—now long gone. But dubstep, to its credit, is wide open for interpretation. Kode9 and the Spaceape’s Memories of the Future has a cinematic and dramatic feel that might appeal to Tricky or Portishead fans. One of the genre’s most celebrated producers, Burial, employs immediately gratifying melodies and soul samples in his melancholy tracks. There aren’t any rigid rules yet—dubstep can go anywhere, and fans and purveyors of breakbeats, techno, house and dub are finding that makes the new sound all the more vital.

BassGoesBoom rinses out at Lava on Fri 4. Kode9 and Phaded spin at Sonotheque on Sat 5.