“Essentially dubstep comes from South London, Brixton, Chelsea, Clapham, and the acres of concrete of Council Houses in the UK,” says Leggo Dub resident DJ TIM HASLETT. “It wasn’t dreamed up by some label.” Haslett is one of the unsung heroes of the Boston scene. An original employee of DJ Raffi’s Boston Beat shop back in East Boston circa 1986, Haslett sold disco 12-inches and original house singles alongside DJ Bruno to crusading record shoppers. Always current, he now pushes the new reggae-fueled hip-hop style that’s killing it in the underground. “There’s nothing anti-commercial about it,” he says. “It’s experimental, but only to a degree. It’s got rhythm, melody, harmony and it’s not assonate or dissonant.”

“I’m excited about dubstep because to me it’s like Motown, it’s like Detroit techno,” says Leggo Dub resident UFO (neé BILLY KIELY), who grew up in Quincy and is the head of sales at Boston-based record distributor Forced Exposure. (Full disclosure: this author is also a FE employee). “It’s like this autonomous black music homegrown from the UK, and to me that’s really exciting.” Haslett, a graduate student of Afro-American culture, identifies dubstep as a link in the Jamaican diaspora: “With the generations of Jamaicans in the UK, it’s always a love of reggae and dub. They would hear it everywhere they went. It’s as if the influences are a hereditary trait.” Kiely, one of the few distributors importing the sound direct from the UK, says the Leggo Dub night is designed to draw the clear connection between Jamaican dub reggae and the hot new sound. “It’s really reggae-conscious. Dubstep producers call on sounds from Middle Eastern music and from UK garage culture and it has a great flavor.”

“When I first heard it, I thought it was the coolest shit I’ve ever heard,” says club-goer Cindy Chen, as a remarkable low-end fills the club. “The beats are so minimal and it’s extremely different, with badass basslines. The fact that you can feel it is also fucking hot.” Adds Kiely, “it’s all low end. It’s paced like dub records, it’s more tracky. Reggae music is apocalyptic . . . and apocryphal, too. And I think dubstep has really called upon that.”

The third element of the night, DJ DISTORT (a/k/a Rob Buschgans), originally comes from the New Jersey hip-hop scene and makes frequent trips to the Tri-State area to watch the new sound evolve. “Post-1995, once the gritty, banging, Havoc- and RZA-style production phased out, I missed straight-up bangers,” he says of the Sopranos-esque locale where he was raised. “Where I grew up, everyone liked rap, like, period. It didn’t matter if you had a mohawk: you listened to Hot 97, period,” he says, rocking a New York Mets cap. “But when I heard dubstep and grime it was amazing because it was almost techno in the sense that it was totally electronic. It wasn’t sampled drum breaks. But those tracks were bangers in the same way that my favorite hip-hop beats were. Plus, the whole concept of sub-bass, you don’t hear that in hip-hop records, you don’t hear that brown-noise, sub-atomic shit. All these tracks have that vibrational bass.” And, says Kiely, it’s a style of music that is itself in motion. “It’s mutating — that’s an apropos metaphor for what it is. There are so many possibilities with it because there’s so much space in the music. It paints a picture of 2006. It sounds like the times.”

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OREN AMBARCHI also knows dub. The guru of the guitar plays the BCA this Saturday with KEITH FULLERTON WHITMAN. Missing it would be regrettable, especially if you’re a fan of Sleep, Isis, or SUNN0))). Oren explores the guitar like none other — creating translucent tones and supple, committed sounds that leave you gasping for air. Like most good minimalism, it’s designed not to lull but to keep you wide awake, and conscious as Freud.

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David Day: circuits@squar3.com