Album Review: Mala - Mala in Cuba

Album Rating: B+

A lot has happened since Mala - as one half of Digital Mystikz - sparked the popularity of Dubstep in the early 00’s: helping to transform a very localised scene into a global phenomenon with his DMZ record label and associated club night. Burial happened. Skrillex happened. And electronic music has flowed ever forward as it merged genre with genre with...

So Mala, now a verifiable ‘dubstep pioneer’ and global public figure as opposed to just another musician in South London, travelled to Cuba in 2011 with the notion of infusing the nation’s music with a dubstep rhythm and weight. As it’s impossible to hold it from you any longer, he pulls it off brilliantly, but such an experimental and ambitious move from an idol in classic-dubstep culture shows just how many miles the genre has moved in such a short space of time. We are now a very long way off the stripped down and thinly veiled worship of low frequencies that describes the movement’s infancy.