Label of the Month: SPE:C

The label SPE:C typically releases chest-rattling bass music - "floor-focussed technoid beaters with the spacious weight of UK stylings". The head of SPE:C, Darwin, moved from Canada to London in 2007 in her early 20s. Given these two facts, you'd be forgiven for conjuring a third "fact" out of thin air and confidently running with it: that Darwin pretty much took a cab straight from Heathrow into the very heart of the UK capital's booming first-wave dubstep scene, immersing herself in a musical and social environment that changed everything and led to all that has come since with SPE:C and her career as a DJ.

You'd be wrong though. "I wasn't part of that scene at all when I was in London," Darwin tells me on the phone from her home in Oaxaca, Mexico, where she has very sensibly based herself through winter for close to a decade. "I did discover dubstep on my own years later, but when I was in London I had no interest in it. I found it really male-dominated and bro-ey - I mean, who were the female dubstep DJs in London in the late 2000s? Mary-Anne Hobbes, Moxie, and… yeah. I think a lot of women, including myself, were excluded from that scene, and discovering the music years later in a totally different environment meant I developed a very different relationship to it." 

During her time in London, Darwin worked for Ministry of Sound and later Fabric, and developed a strong interest in spare, flinty techno - "soon after moving over I saw Audion live, which blew my mind". It was only when she moved to Berlin in 2010, at a point in time when she had become "extremely tired of techno", that bass music fully caught her imagination. The SUB:STANCE parties co-run by Paul Rose (aka Scuba) were a major part of this awakening, but Rose had an even more immediate influence on it than that. 

When she moved to Berlin, Darwin moved into an apartment previously occupied by Rose, which remains her Berlin residence to this day. A keen adopter of digital DJing, Rose had left his vinyl collection behind in the flat, leaving Darwin free to discover a treasure trove of old dubplates and DMZ, Tectonic and Tempa from the comfort of her living room. 

Darwin continued to work in electronic music PR (full disclosure: I have known her for many years because of this) and started SPE:C in 2015 when a friend who had been encouraging her to channel her  taste in music and aesthetics into a label sent her a demo he thought would fit the bill. "It was the heyday of Livity Sound and I was really into that UK bass/techno hybrid aesthetic. From the start I wanted to release artists who were young or who maybe wouldn't have the opportunity or resources to put a record out, and I realised that running a label could work because I had all this knowledge of the music industry from years of working in different roles behind the scenes."

SPE:C's first release was the UK artist Decka's "Begyndelsen" — a pivotal track that helped set label's ethos and aesthetic: "a label releasing technoid bass music by undiscovered artists, with a sci-fi and psychedelic aesthetic." A modest but steady vinyl-only release schedule followed, and SPE:C grew in tandem with Darwin's burgeoning DJ career. She also ran regular parties (Reef in Berlin, and a residency at YuYu club in Mexico City) and readily calls the label and parties "passion projects" paid for by DJing, a dynamic that holds even now.

What felt like a milestone moment came in February 2020 with the release of Transformations, a fantastic five-track compilation that perfectly encapsulated the label's trippy take on bass music via tracks from main(void), Delo, Premis, Alex R and An Avrin. It was reviewed breathlessly and sold well, placing SPE:C firmly on a positive trajectory - "you can feel when there's a wave", as Darwin puts it. We all know what happened next, and the Covid-19 pandemic duly hit the label hard. "I did another few releases through 2020 and into 2021, but they weren't hitting, and I just thought, 'I don't want to do this any more. I'm spending all this money on artwork and mastering, and if people aren't engaging with the music then I'm losing money on every release for no reason'."

And for a couple of years that appeared to be that - SPE:C was quietly retired as a going concern, and Darwin continued to split her time between Berlin and Mexico, DJing regularly in Europe or the Americas, depending on the location of her current home base. Eventually though, SPE:C's founding mission to help young, underexposed producers lured her back into the world of running a small record label. 

Darwin can pinpoint exactly when the label's rebirth began. She had a gig in Vancouver with Destrata, a young artist from Canada whose (so far unreleased) music she had been into for some time. "I was telling him how much I'd been playing and enjoying his music and he asked me if I would ever think of putting something of his out, because it was a dream of his to release something on SPE:C," she says. "By that point I considered the label totally dead, but after a while I thought, 'do you know what, I've been rinsing the shit out of this so maybe I should release it'."

SPE:C was resurrected after a two-year hiatus in May 2023 with the release of Destrata's Let The Dust Settle. Close friends of Darwin's did the artwork and mastering on the cheap, allowing her to get excited about releasing music again without worrying too much about the financial implications. Further fuel for this fire came when the LA artist Carré, whose Fast At Work party Darwin had been booked for, sent her some tracks. Two Carré records have followed on SPE:C, the second of which, Air Sign, did particularly well and featured in RA's tracks of the year list for 2024. Carré is clearly on the way to big things now, the perfect outcome for a SPE:C artist as far as Darwin is concerned, and the label is firmly back in business.

This year is SPE:C's 10th birthday, and Darwin has plans to celebrate that are as exciting as they are out of character. "On principle I've never had remixes on the label, because I feel like it distracts from the work of the original artist - particularly if they're an unknown artist. If you have some big-name remixer in there it can overshadow their music. But this year I decided it would be cool to do a load of back-catalogue remixes, because it's the 10th anniversary, because of the label's hiatus and because there are a load of new people interested in SPE:C since I brought it back. So I've got some friends like Hodge, Hassan Abou Alam, Introspekt and A.Fruit to do those, and there will be 20 remixes in total."

SPE:C's 10th anniversary will also be marked in 2025 with merch releases, a series of showcase nights in Paris, Lisbon and other cities around the world, and the release of a limited dubstick: "a USB stick with a 3-D printed keychain and a load of unreleased music on it - there will probably be 200 of them and the music will never be released anywhere else." The label's regular schedule is picking up too, with releases from Venezuelan producers Dagga & Manao, Axle and more scheduled through Spring, and it's clear a break that was the result of deep disillusionment has ended up having a revitalising effect on Darwin and her label.

"With Carré doing so well and more and more artists coming to me with music I feel like I need to release, I'm just really excited about being back in it," she says with a grin. "It feels so good again."

Listen to SPE:C's 'Label of the Month' chart below or check it out on Beatport.