When I don’t want to sit in silence during deep work periods, I regularly turn to a specific style of music: Dub techno.
The combination of gentle 4/4 rhythms, minimal synthesizer figures, textural noise and dub effects supports my focus instead of distracting me.
Walk into any software company or agency office space in the city, and there’s a good chance you will hear a dub techno playlist chugging along at low to mid volume.
I love the sound, but I’m not an orthodox purist – I’m referring to it more as a loose aesthetic than a genre with a strict formula. The borders to adjacent styles (ambient and minimal techno, microhouse, clicks’n’cuts, glitch) have always been blurry.
First created in early 1990s Berlin, this electronic music subgenre arguably had its heydays between 1995 and 2005, but always remained popular with a certain demographic – and even celebrated a comeback with a new generation in recent years.
Here are 15 of my favorite dub techno albums for your working and traveling ambience, also perfectly suited for walking and cycling along my adopted hometown’s canals, railway bridges and slab constructions.
Feel free to add your own favorites in the comments.
Basic Channel – BCD (1995)
Dub techno’s founding fathers are two Berlin-based producers and DJs: Mark Ernestus and Moritz von Oswald. In 1992/93, they created the subgenre’s blueprint under their monikers Maurizio and Basic Channel, combining the aesthetics of Detroit and Berlin techno with the studio techniques of Jamaican dub.
This compilation of tracks originally released on 12-inches contains most of their groundbreaking early material – the style-defining “Quadrant Dub”, the mysterious remix of Vainqueur’s “Lyot”, the shimmering ambience of “Mutism”, and the crackling majesty of “Radiance”. As classic as it gets.
Porter Ricks – Biokinetics (1996)
From 1996 to 2003, Ernestus and von Oswald ran Chain Reaction, a label specifically dedicated to dub techno. Their first release was the debut of German producer duo Thomas Köner and Andy Mellwig, two art school types that shared a love for classical and Baroque music (Händel being one of their mutual favorite composers).
They’d also learned from the Basic Channel playbook in terms of their sonic palette and mixing techniques – their seminal tunes were as suited for headphone listening as for Berlin’s underground squat parties. The aquatic theme of the record would turn into one of the standard dub techno tropes.
Monolake – Hongkong (1997)
I could just go ahead and list all Chain Reaction albums, but I’ll just include one more – the debut of Gerhard Behles’ and Robert Henke’s project Monolake. These two computer nerds and club kids traveled to Hong Kong for an electronic music conference in 1996, bringing home a bunch of recordings that became the sonic thread for this album. Musically, the uptempo beats and ambient pads reference the duo’s intense nightlife experiences, but the use of field recordings points to their interests in more academic styles of electronic composition.
By the end of the decade, Behles and Henke had started developing the Ableton Live software. Behles would end his musician career to lead the distribution company, and as of 2025, he’s still Ableton’s acting CEO, while Monolake has now essentially been Robert Henke’s solo project for many years.
+5 More Chain Reaction Classics
For a deep dive into the label catalogue, continue with these albums that all defined the original late 1990s dub techno sound:
Vainqueur – Reductions 1995-1997
Various Artists – Decay Product (1997)
Substance – Session Elements (1998)
Fluxion – Vibrant Forms (1999)
Vladislav Delay – Multila (2000)
Pole – 1 2 3 (1998-2000)
Berlin-based producer and engineer Stefan Betke’s early trilogy under his Pole moniker should not be filed under dance music. It wouldn’t make sense in a club context except for the odd afterhour set – more dub than techno, this is all humming bass, crackle, hiss and static, with little melodies to distract from these ASMR-like textures.
Over the course of three equally brilliant albums, Betke explored the use of the studio as an instrument in a Lee Perry sense, with electronic music instead of reggae as the base layer. This set of albums remains a timeless essential of the genre. As home listening and office ambience, it’s unbeatable.
GAS – Pop (2000)
For his GAS project, Cologne-based electronic music impresario Wolfgang Voigt was inspired by memories of tripping on mushrooms in the Black Forest, where he grew up. Sampling German orchestral music like Wagner and similar composers from old vinyl records, he constructed a nebulous ambience that truly makes you feel as if you’re stumbling through foggy woodlands, with the steady techno pulse as a present but distant call from civilization.
Pop is my favorite out of Voigt’s four-album series recorded in the second half of the 1990s, because it’s slightly more melodic and less murky than the rest (hence the title), but you can also just get the 2008 box set Nah Und Fern that includes all four undisputed classics.
Jan Jelinek – Loop-finding-jazz-records (2001)
Legend has it that the Berlin-based producer Jan Jelinek created this highly textural, organic slab of dubby electronica by sampling records from his rich jazz collection because he hated playing the keyboard (and also couldn’t bring himself to learn it properly).
Between 1998 and 2002, Jelinek would also create influential techno and house abstractions under the Farben moniker (his Textstar collection of EPs is highly recommended as well), and he would go on to make more ambient and esoteric music afterwards. This album remains his definitive masterpiece though – abstract but accessible, or as Brian Eno famously put it, “as ignorable as it is interesting”.
Rhythm & Sound – Rhythm & Sound (2001)
In the second half of the 1990s, Basic Channel’s Mark Ernestus and Moritz von Oswald launched the next iteration of their collaboration by focusing even deeper on dub techniques and working with the Jamaican-born, Berlin-based vocalist Paul St. Hilaire (alias Tikiman) under the Rhythm & Sound moniker.
After 1998, they pivoted towards instrumental, abstract pieces of dubby electronica that steered further away from the functional framework of techno. Some of their best work is contained on this self-titled compilation. This is the absolute pinnacle of electronic music period – perfectly restrained and immensely beautiful, like musique concrète with a deep appreciation for Caribbean soundboy wizardry.
Pub – >single (2002)
As early as the late 1990s, dub techno spread from Berlin to other cities and countries – producers from all over Europe, the UK and the U.S. started iterating on the Basic Channel/Chain Reaction template, making it distinctively their own in the process.
Case in point, Glaswegian producer Pub took dub techno out of Berlin’s industrial spaces into the wild Scottish highlands. On these six sprawling tunes produced and released on 12-inches between 1998 and 2002, Pub enhances the effect of his trance-y, swirling arpeggios and twinkling analog synth keys with muted drum pulses and massive amounts of reverb. The result sounds like a dub techno-infused version of his fellow Scotsmen Boards of Canada.
Deepchord presents Echospace – The Coldest Season (2007)
From the sun-drenched Scottish hills to Detroit’s dark and misty back alleys. Echospace is a collaborative project of Rod Modell (alias Deepchord) and Steve Hitchell (Intrusion, Soultek), two experienced producers from the Midwest U.S. who created their debut album as Echospace strictly on vintage analog equipment: Effect pedals, noise generators, tape delays, signal processors, analog samplers and synthesizers.
This is music that lays bare the core and essence of dub techno – the atmospheric static, the deep basslines, the massive kickdrums, all elements tweaked with precision to maximum effect. This cyberpunk soundtrack of urban decay is your perfect noise-canceling company for your ride on the last train home.
Yagya – Rigning (2009)
This Icelandic producer carved out his very own niche with a dreamy, melancholic variant of the genre. His stand-out album remains Rigning, a longform suite of movements that according to the liner notes “depicts a city sleeping as gentle rain falls and dubbed out grooves zone you out.”
With its ambient synth pads and atmospheric field recordings, Rigning’s mood feels closer in spirit to Burial’s heartfelt rave echoes than to Basic Channel’s ascetic soundsystem reductions. This is musical comfort food, a deeply meditative and sometimes sad, but essentially uplifting listening experience.
Voices From The Lake – Voices From The Lake (2012)
The duo of Italian producers Donato Dozzy and Neel first created the music that became their debut album as a group for a live performance at a festival held by a lake in a Japanese mountain forest. The music was created out of samples and recordings of dripping water, chirping birds or rustling leaves. With its slow-building tracks constructed from these natural sound sources, Voices From The Lake became a sleeper hit in electronic music circles. The duo have recently announced a long-awaited sequel for December 5.
Topdown Dialectic – Topdown Dialectic (2018)
All of Topdown Dialectic’s untitled tracks have the exact identical length (5:00 minutes). The artist behind the project remains anonymous, and when I recently saw them perform at Berlin Atonal, a single person stoically worked some equipment on stage. Actually, TD is more a name for a generative process than an artist: “The recordings are captures and edits of various nonlinear sound-systems, shifting conditions, and reactions to internal changes”, the liner notes explain.
Calling this music ‘dub techno’ might feel reductive – this is raw, abstract electronic music that draws influences from Basic Channel (who are very fond of their privacy too and still rarely give interviews) as much as early bleep techno, IDM and mid-period Autechre. These strangely twisting and turning tracks seem to live and breathe like digital organisms that desire to break free from their generative origin.
Earthen Sea – Grass And Trees (2019)
Jacob Long is a former post-hardcore/noise rock bassist from Washington D.C. who’s been making electronic soundscapes under the moniker Earthen Sea for two decades. My favorite album from his rich discography is Grass And Trees – a minimal exploration of the sweet spot between ambient and dub techno with an extremely limited sound palette but a massively hypnotizing effect. The tracks are relatively short (at least for this genre), but exempt from any clutter or excess. An album I’ve been regularly returning to throughout the pandemic and ever since.
Shinichi Atobe – Yes (2020)
This Japanese producer released just one seminal dub techno EP on Chain Reaction in 2001 before vanishing from the scene for 13 years. UK producer duo Demdike Stare finally managed to find him, living a quiet life in Saitama, a huge city north of Tokyo, still making music. As a recent interview shows, Atobe is just a humble man of few words who happens to make some amazing electronic music.
Roughly every two years since 2014, Atobe has been sending a burned CD with a selection of new tracks to Manchester for release on Demdike Stare’s label. His sound oscillates between airy dub techno, mellow deep house and ambient synth excursions. I love all of his records, but Yes feels like his most well-rounded full-length effort that truly represents the whole spectrum of his work.
Purelink – Signs (2023)
Purelink consists of three U.S. producers in their late 20s, sharing a studio and a love for the electronic music of the 1990s and 2000s, combining dub techno frameworks with microhouse, ambient and IDM influences and finding deep appreciation for their update of the classic sound from the electronic music community.
On their debut album as group, they built a whole new world from the playful, experimental mindset that lies at the core of their jamming practice. While dub techno can often feel heady and abstract, Purelink manage to convey a deep, warm humanity through their vaporous tunes.
excellent selection! And, for me, no Loidis is a smart move.
top choices stephan, all times favs every one