Rob Ellis, better known as Pinch, is one of the forces that shaped the DNA of dubstep. Armed with an ear toward the seismic weight of bass, he’s spent two decades carving out spaces where dub, techno, grime, and experimental club music collide. On March 14, that space is Bucharest as Pinch arrives at Control Club to celebrate of 20 years of Hyperdub and Tectonic.
Born in Scotland in 1980 and raised in Newport, Wales, Pinch eventually landed in bass-heavy Bristol. Then came London’s FWD>> in 2003 as nothing short of an epiphany, where dubstep was seething with potential. Sensing a gap outside the capital, he set up Subloaded in 2004, the first Bristol club night devoted to dubstep and grime.
The next step was Tectonic Recordings, founded in 2005. Tectonic was an incubator for dubstep that could breathe, mutate, and crossbreed with techno, industrial, and other club sounds without purity. It welcomed the weird and the forward-thinking through a roster that reads like a who’s who of bass futurists: Skream, Loefah, Flying Lotus, Digital Mystikz, 2562, and Joker.
Though Tectonic Recordings has remained a beacon for progressive bass music, Pinch sought a space to push things even further. So, in 2013, he launched Cold Recordings. This imprint would be built for UK bass and techno’s more abstract forms. Artists like Batu, Acre, and Elmono used it as a test site, crafting disjointed rhythms and sub-heavy experiments into something entirely alien.
Pinch’s productions inhabit deep space. His 2006 track Qawwali, released via Planet Mu, fused devotional harmonies with tectonic sub-bass. His first full-length, Underwater Dancehall (2007), doubled down—one disc filled with vocal-led cuts, the other with bare-bones instrumentals. After years of steering collaborative projects, Pinch returned to solo album mode with Reality Tunnels (2020), his first in over a decade.
As dubstep ossified into formulaic wobble bass, Pinch was already moving on. Croydon House (2010) was a wink to techno, while his 2014 collaboration with Mumdance (Pinch B2B Mumdance) lashed together industrial grime, broken techno, and mutant bass.
Pinch has rarely worked alone. His 2011 album with Shackleton, released on Honest Jon’s, is an eerie odyssey into ritualistic bass music. His ongoing work with Adrian Sherwood led to Late Night Endless (2015) and Man vs. Sofa (2017), where Sherwood’s hands-on dub sorcery met Pinch’s surgical precision created 21st-century hallucinations of bass, delay, and feedback loops. In 2019, he reunited with DJ Die for Jungle Reflection, a love letter to Jungle.
Grime MCs have also been vital to the world of Pinch. Big Slug (with Mumdance and Riko Dan) and Screamer channeled dancehall’s gut-punch energy into post-apocalyptic club weapons. His work with Killa P, Trim, and Kahn cemented his reputation for blending sound system culture with UK underground grit.
Pinch’s DJ sets are anything but predictable. As a vinyl purist, he often records his mixes in one take using only vinyl and dubplates. His FabricLive.61 mix, released in 2012, is a testament to this approach and became one of the defining musical snapshots of the 2010s, extending his influence beyond the UK. From warehouse raves to festival stages, he has now played in over 40 countries. Whether through his productions, DJ sets, or the experimental playgrounds he’s built with his labels, Pinch is one of bass music's most restless, visionary minds. Innovation never stands still, and neither does he.
