It starts with a deep, unsettling frequency. It's not quite a melody, but it's not quite noise. Then, a skittering beat that won’t settle, just a little too fast. Suddenly, you realize this is the world of Kode9. On March 14, the frontiers of this world come to Bucharest as to celebrate 20 Years of Hyperdub and Tectonic at Control Club.
For the past two decades, Steve Goodman, aka Kode9, has artistically and intellectually redrawn the parameters of electronic music. He is an artist perpetually on the move, obliterating genres and soldering new ones out of the wreckage. As the founder of Hyperdub, he midwifed the most avant-garde of dubstep before turning toward footwork, grime, South African gqom, and cyborg funk that exist outside time itself.
But his influence runs deeper. Yes, Kode9 is a DJ and Producer. But he is also a bass music theorist, a sonic affect cartographer, and an architect of paranoia and futurism. His 2009 book Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear examines how sound can be weaponized and used as a tool of psychological control capable of shaping emotions and behavior. From military psyops to the physiological effects of sub-bass frequencies, he applies concepts from Deleuze, Guattari, and affect theory to analyze everything from reggaeton’s sonic intensity to police sirens and urban noise pollution. His music applies these theories in real time, disturbing, manipulating, and rewiring dancefloor biology.
Born in Glasgow in 1973, Goodman came of age in the era of soundsystem culture, rare groove, and pirate radio. But the moment that changed everything came in the early ‘90s when he first encountered jungle. The speed, bass pressure, and physicality of the sound rewired him. “It was like hearing acceleration made audible,” he once said.
At the same time, he was pursuing a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Warwick. There, he became involved with the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU)—a semi-mythical collective of accelerationist theorists, futurists, and electronic media experimentalists who treated philosophy like a hacked operating system. Their obsessions with Afrofuturism, cybernetics, neural networks, and jungle as sonic warfare would all become embedded in Goodman’s approach to music.
By the time he relocated to London in 1997, UK garage was splintering, grime was incubating, and dubstep was a distant ghost on the horizon. Goodman embedded himself in the scene, spinning at legendary nights like FWD>> and broadcasting on pirate stations like Rinse FM. Soon after, he would truly make his mark with Hyperdub.
Originally launched in 1999 as an online magazine, Hyperdub was never really supposed to be a record label. Instead, it would act as a space for bass music theory and apply viral media concepts, accelerationist aesthetics, and sonic fiction to the underground. But in 2004, Goodman flipped the switch, and Hyperdub became a label. Its first release, Sine of the Dub, was a statement of intent: Prince’s Sign o’ the Times reconfigured into a spectral dirge, with The Spaceape's vocals dripping paranoia over sub-bass voids. Then came Burial. His self-titled debut album (2006) and Untrue (2007) suspended dubstep in a ghostly, crackling half-life. Though his sound would become era-defining, Goodman wasn’t about to let Hyperdub become a solely dubstep imprint.
Kode9 cracked the genre open, flooding the label with UK funky, mutant grime, footwork, gqom, deconstructed club music, and avant-pop. By the mid-2010s, Hyperdub had released DJ Rashad’s seminal Double Cup, Jessy Lanza’s electronic R&B, Fatima Al Qadiri’s dystopia, and Laurel Halo’s genre-agnosticism. This discography proved that if dubstep once had been about minimalism, Hyperdub was about maximal possibility.
Kode9’s productions have always considered where rhythm, bass, and space might go next. His early albums, Memories of the Future, Black Sun, and Killing Season, all with The Spaceape, were grime-informed dubstep infused with an apocalyptic take on the spoken word. But when The Spaceape passed away in 2014, everything changed. His next album, Nothing (2015), exercised absence. It was a record that seemed to erase itself as it played. Taking cues from Chicago footwork, it stripped everything down to rapid percussive bursts, airless bass stabs, and moments of eerie silence. It was grief rendered in negative space.
Then came Escapology (2022) and Astro-Darien, his most fully realized speculative fiction project yet. Framed as the soundtrack to a breakaway Scottish space colony, Escapology was a video game and sci-fi-informed collision of jungle, footwork, and cybernetics, while Astro-Darien functioned as an audio essay exploration of lost futures and techno-nationalist dreams—a collapsing Britain as narrated by robot Scots. In 2024, he released Phoneglow/Eyes Go Blank, a new collaboration with Burial, reminding the world that both artists remain as elusive as ever.
Today, Kode9 remains one of the most radical figures in electronic music. His DJ sets are breakneck fusions of grime, footwork, dub, and sci-fi club music, and they are also some of the most unpredictable in the game. His mixes, from his Dubstep Allstars Vol.3 (2006) to Fabriclive 100 (2018) with Burial, feel as if they are in a constant state of mutation. In the club, he plays with urgency as if reality itself is struggling to keep up.
But more than anything, Kode9 is a disruptor. Bypassing nostalgia, safety, and the endless loops of revivalism, his allegiances remain to uncertainty and acceleration. In an era where AI churns algorithmic dance music and ghost producers flood the zone, Kode9’s work feels more urgent than ever.
