First arriving on the UK scene in 2009, Al Wootton notched up a number of underground hits under his Deadboy alias on labels including Numbers and Well Rounded. His floor-focused verve and deft application of cute, catchy R&B samples sounded fresh in the face of dubstep’s increasingly murky (and often moodily masculine) trajectory. Tracks like “If U Want Me” and “U Cheated” borrowed from the blossoming UK funky scene and would be lumped in alongside everything from the ill-fated future-garage revival to the so-called tropical sound. Ultimately, though, they formed part of a shift that helped open up audiences to the experimental approach of dubstep-adjacent artists like Peverelist, 2562, and Martyn, who had taken to dialling up the dub elements in dub techno. It’s this hinterland that Wootton, having retired the Deadboy moniker, explores on his debut LP under his own name, Witness.
Arriving via Trule—Wootton’s own label, which, in its two short years, has established itself as a buy-on-sight imprint—the album is the product of a couple of particularly fertile weeks in his newly established home studio out on England’s East Coast. Moving from digi-dub to burbling garage, breaks, ravey chords, four-to-the-floor sunrise anthems, and, finally, an impeccable dub-techno workout on closer “Cephas,” Witness offers its own chronology of UK club music. The reality isn’t quite that neat a journey, of course, but the ground Wootton manages to cover in just shy of 40 minutes is impressive; that he does so without the music ever feeling forced is more so.
Sometimes, he squeezes this broad sweep into a single track: “Over,” with its melange of plump kicks, incidental synths, and occasional flourish of breakbeats, feels like a microcosm of the album as a whole. Tracks like “Sema” and “Witness” are more singularly focused—the former a gloopy drum’n’bass stepper, the latter swung 2-step—but connect with the rest of the album via Wootton’s signature airy pads that drift from track to track throughout. The lasting impression is of Wootton’s deep attachment to the UK’s ever-evolving electronic underground. With shared club spaces in peril like never before, the record provides an opportune cross-section of the island nation’s rich dance-music history.
It’s ironic that Wootton should produce this ode to UK dance music having decamped from the friction and buzz of the capital to the relatively sleepy environs of Ramsgate—a coastal town on the country’s Eastern shore, probably most famous today for its depressing cameo in the latest season of Top Boy. While for the most part this physical distance is immaterial, Witness does lack one of clubbing’s “What the fuck is this?” moments—the sort of ear-popping tune that makes you screw up your face mid-drinks order and cast a desperate glance at the DJ booth in the vain hope of discovering just what it is you’re hearing. For seasoned dance-music fans, there’s nothing here that won’t already sound in some way familiar. Given the relentless pace of UK dance music’s evolution, this might be taken as a criticism, but it needn’t be: Sometimes it’s fine to have a little more of a good thing. And in that sense, Witness manages the sometimes tricky tussle between healthy microdoses of nostalgia and the rush of the new with magnetic, full-hearted aplomb.