Shackleton was not featured on BBC Radio 1’s 12-hour ‘dubstep takeover’. This special will have cemented in the public eye the view that dubstep is synonymous with pubstep, otherwise known as brostep or wobble.  This sub-genre consists of a wobbly, distorted mid-range blast, often with little or not bass. The simple etymology of dubstep is a portmanteau of dub, the highly influential Jamaican genre which emphasises the space between notes, and 2 step, the UK garage variant with skippy beats. Pubstep has little to do with 2 step, and even less to do with dub.

Caspa and Rusko are partially to blame for this, having mixed Fabric’s first true dubstep mix. Released as part of the London nightclub’s Fabriclive series, these two wobble early adopters popularised the sound which would later be taken to its parodic self-conclusion by Youtube favourites such as Flux Pavilion and Datsik. Shackleton stands in contrast to this over-compressed, rinsed-out sound: a chap from Lancashire who moved first to Bristol, and more recently to Berlin to pursue his own more subtle music.  The tracklisting originally came from one of the Fabric managers recording one of Shackleton’s live sets. Shack then recovered this file and re-recorded a very similar tracklisting in the studio, with 12 of the 22 tracks previously unreleased.  

In 1995, Radio 3 sent some contemporary techno tapes to the renowned 20th century experimental composer Karlheinz Stockhausen.  Avant garde music magazine The Wire ran an interview under the title ‘Advice to clever children’. He criticised one track by the Aphex Twin as being overly simple due to its ‘post-African repetitions’.  This R&S-era Aphex was rhythmically unvaried for him, especially compared to his later drill’n’bass madness. If a basic 808 beat is a post-African rhythm, Shackleton’s beats are defiantly African. His percussive beats are evocative of the continent where humans come from even more so than the most tribal elements of the contemporary UK funky sound

Influential indie blog Gorilla vs Bear has named this mix CD one of its top 10 CDs of 2010. How is this possible? Well Shackleton, like the mighty Ricardo Villalobos and the more obscure Pure Science before him, has built this mix purely from his own productions. Every track is by Shackleton, and sounds like Shackleton. The key elements are African percussion, sometimes Arabic strings and menacing bass drops which will rattle your chest cage when played on a loud system. The mood makes me feel like I’m in a desert at night-time with the wind whispering to me, and I can’t quite make out the words.  This is not as avant garde as fellow Lancashireman Muslimgauze and definitely dance music, it’s just that you’re more likely to hear it in part of the Rainbow complex or one of the other venues that open up in Digbeth for a few months before being closed down than in Air or on Broad Street.