“When you name something, you give it power...”

That old axiom proved true for dubstep in the mid-2000s, as this once-variant of 2-step garage came into its own as a genre around that moniker. While UKG centred itself around the language and imagery of fantasy and seduction (Twice As Nice, Champagne Dance, et al) and grime took advantage of middle-class fears regarding the people and sounds emerging from London tower-blocks, dubstep—both the word and the music—sounded like the science-fiction future ravers had predicted for years. Yet like all early forms of rave music, dubstep was essentially functional: tunes by DJs for DJs, to smash the dance and pirate radio sets. It was the album format that freed dubstep to comment on city life, urban decay, War On Terror paranoia and the meaning of the music itself, and few early dubstep albums had more to say than Kode9 & The Spaceape’s Memories Of The Future.

Let’s start with that album title: part Zen koan, part stoned 4am musing, part academic dissertation chapter heading, it’s essentially meaningless but infinitely evocative, conjuring visions of heady hard sci-fi novellas, more so than bass-bins and turntables. In lesser hands, this could scan as pretentious, but in Kode9 and Spaceape’s hands, it helped expand dubstep’s purview past the rave, marking the genre as music for thinking as well as dancing. It’s also a title that could have only come from two comparative outsiders to the scene, men older and from further afield than the genre’s Croydon core. Glaswegian Kode9 had circled London rave music since early trips to Metalheadz in ‘95, initially a jungle obsessive before moving south and following the massive to the darker side of garage and its variants.

Spaceape, meanwhile, grew up in London, and was pursuing a career as a video artist when his then-roommate, Kode9, suggested they make a tune together. That first track, 2004’s “Sign Of The Dub”—a cover of Prince’s “Sign o’ The Times”, with vocals delivered by Spaceape in a torpid patois over little more than bass pulses and delayed chords—wasn’t really dubstep in any structural sense, but the beatless single evoked the same feeling of dread and decay as the two experienced at club nights like FWD>>. The 12’ sold well, setting the stage for not only Memories Of The Future, but Hyperdub as one of the UK’s most adventurous labels.

Though overseen by Kode9, in the most important ways, Memories Of The Future is Spaceape’s album, as the languid rhythms and cavernous sense of space means that it’s his resonant baritone that holds everything together. Reviewers and fans immediately made a connection between his plainspoken delivery and the dub poets of the ‘80s, acts like Linton Kwesi Johnson and Mutabaruka, as well as ‘90s trip-hop acts like Tricky. But moving past those surface-level comparisons reveals a much richer and more varied web of influences. In interviews, he’d namedrop acclaimed authors like Octavia Butler, Phillip K Dick, William Burroughs and William Gibson, and his own lyrics shared these writers’ worldbuilding and atmosphere, as much as the dread poets’ sense of political protest.

Musically, he was just as apt to mention Public Enemy as Prince Far-I, or to namedrop post-punks Public Image Limited and hip-hop weirdoes like Dr. Octagon in the same breath. These myriad literary and musical references, along with Spaceape’s passion for fashion, cinema and video art, helped ensure that his lyrics and vocals on Memories Of The Future went far beyond pastiche and revivalism, jumbling up some of the 20th century’s best at the dawn of the 21st. More pragmatically, his vocals fit Kode9’s minimalism like a hand in a glove, standing apart from the grime generation’s rapid-fire delivery and youthful bravado while also sharing their dancehall and reggae roots. To this day, there’s no other sound quite like it.

Memories Of The Future stands out as a singular moment in Kode9’s arc as well—an oasis of dubby calm in between his frenetic jungle and footwork eras. Spaceape may have been Memories Of The Future’s star and lead actor, but he couldn’t have asked for a more sympatico director than Kode. Along with his rave education at Metalheadz, Kode9 was a member of Warwick University’s Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), a think-tank also featuring luminaries like cultural theorist Mark Fisher and author/filmmaker Kodwo Eshun, that sought to combine academic headiness to electronic music’s physicality. From our vantage point in 2026, this is par for the course, as you can’t throw a stone without hitting an academic pontificating badly about dancefloors as spaces of resistance, for clout. Only a few years after hardcore had terrified (or at least irritated) the masses with novelty hits like Smart E’s children’s TV show theme-sampling “Sesame’s Treet”, however, this was a truly innovative stance, and this theoretical underpinning served as the perfect North Star for an album celebrating dub and rave music at its deepest and sparsest.

Not that the album is all dread and screwfaces: tracks like the opening “Glass” wrap the listener in a warm hug, while “Victim” and “Curious” barrel forward with an intensity absent from much of the half-step riddims taking over the dance in 2006. Yes, beatless excursions like “Nine”, “Sine” and “Lime” may have earned plaudits from dub-techno aficionados in Berlin, but Memories Of The Future is full of winking nods that serve to pop any bubbling sense of self-seriousness. From The Beatles, at their most Yoko, to 16-bit videogames to August Pablo’s use of the melodica to dramatic Kurosawa film scores, Kode9 fills the album with just as many reference points as his vocalist, creating a kaleidoscopic sonic collage that’s just as concerned about turning you on to something cool as it is critiquing society’s rot.

As for the slower tracks? Blame that on the skunk and Kode9’s many opening DJ sets at FWD>>, where his restraint and self-discipline ensured headliners felt no pressure to go ‘ard. And even that heaviness had a flip side, with dancers going double time to fill in half-step’s gaps, flipping junglists’ halftime skanking on its head, moving perilously fast to beats that landed incredibly slow.

Nevertheless, the duo couldn’t continue at this pace forever, and as dubstep turned towards more aggressive sounds, Kode9 and Spaceape pivoted towards the emerging sound of UK funky, marrying its broken house rhythms to their interest in science-fiction and darkness on the underrated “Black Sun”. Tragically, Spaceape was then diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer, passing away shortly after dropping the musically free-form EP, Killing Season—an unflinching look at the toll this disease takes on the human body. The news of Spaceape’s passing led to an outpouring of condolences as the dubstep community reminisced on the power of his voice, and mourned his artistry and presence. Since then, Kode9 has returned to speedier forms of music, becoming one of the UK’s longest-standing champions of Chicago footwork.

Memories Of The Future remains a singular album and one of dubstep’s very best full-length efforts. Its magpie approach to sampling predicted the rising interest in concepts like chiptune, while its combination of academic headiness and pop directness anticipated the return of rave’s politicised edge. As for Spaceape’s vocals, you can hear echoes of his artistry everywhere—from Flowdan’s basso profundo to the close-mic’d, hush toned and diaristic emcees of today’s bedroom underground. Just as importantly, Hyperdub remains a vital node in UK underground music, both on the dancefloor and off. Drawing from the past and unique in its present, Memories Of The Future was aptly titled, as it led directly to the future Kode9 and Spaceape dreamed up, apocalyptic as it is.