Hyperdub is a London electronic-music label founded in 2004 by Steve Goodman, the producer and theorist who records as Kode9. It began as something else — a web magazine about the Jamaican influence on UK electronic music, later a radio slot — and its founding is one of the rare cases where the record itself disagrees about when the thing started: the label's own press archive says the project was set up in 2001, while Wikipedia, Dazed, and Rolling Stone date the webzine to 1999 and other accounts split the difference at 2000. What is not disputed is the label: in 2004, after The Bug told Goodman to release his own track himself, Hyperdub put out HYP001 — "Sine of the Dub" / "Stalker" by Kode9 with vocalist Daddi Gee, later known as The Spaceape.

## The Burial era

The label's third release was an unsolicited demo's payoff: Burial's South London Boroughs EP in 2005, then the self-titled debut in 2006, then Untrue in November 2007 — a record that turned a cult dubstep imprint into a landmark. Untrue was nominated for the 2008 Mercury Prize, was hunted by tabloids determined to name its anonymous maker (he unmasked himself on MySpace that August), and spent the next decade being canonized: FACT's decade list, Pitchfork's "most important electronic album of the century so far," anniversary essays at ten years. Hyperdub's public identity and Burial's anonymity-era mystique remain difficult to separate — even as the catalog long since moved past the sound that made them famous together.

## The widening

The fifth-anniversary compilation in 2009 documented a label already restless: dubstep had become UK funky, wonky, and things without names yet. What followed reads like a map of underground electronic music's next decade — Laurel Halo's Quarantine (2012, The Wire's release of the year), Jessy Lanza's electro-R&B debut Pull My Hair Back (2013), Fatima Al Qadiri's Asiatisch (2014), Dean Blunt's orbit through aliases and the Babyfather album (2016), and the Teklife bridge: DJ Rashad's Rollin' EP and Double Cup in 2013 carried Chicago footwork to the label's audience as directly as anything in its catalog. 2014 was the label's cruelest and biggest year — Rashad died in April, The Spaceape in October, and in between the label ran a four-compilation tenth-anniversary campaign with international shows. Kode9's first solo album, Nothing (2015), was made inside that loss.

## Twenty years

The label marked its twentieth anniversary in 2024 the way it marks things — with music rather than ceremony: a Burial × Kode9 split 12-inch, a second one from the Infirmary sessions, anniversary shows from Corsica Studios to Chicago's Metro, and a fresh generation on the roster — aya, Proc Fiskal, Nazar, Loraine James, Heavee — alongside the long-tenured names. The critical record is unusually warm (Mixmag floated it for label of the decade; Dazed calls it one of London's best-ever labels), but this index keeps those framings labeled as reception. The founder still runs it; the founding myth still includes a demonstration CD arriving in the post and a career built, by Goodman's own account, as "a series of accidents."

*This index was compiled from public sources and does not imply the organization's endorsement. Citations live in the packet's source catalog.*