By the time Robert Stagg’s DJ career brought him to dubstep, he had scratched his own turntables to pieces. “When I started making dubstep, my equipment was so broken,” he admits to Time Out. “Seriously, if I used it, it’d make bad noises.”

After DJing for years in Cardiff, Wales, spinning jungle and hip-hop, Stagga made his way into dubstep production in 2003, and has since become an in-demand name, both in production and DJing. “I’m trying to hold my own sound, and the sound of the people I’m connected with,” he says. “I usually don’t play stuff from people I don’t know personally, and I also like to play [tracks that] people might not have heard.”

It could be a tall order for Stagga, as many in the dubstep scene are familiar with his music, notably noise-heavy track Sick As Sin, which one creative YouTube user described as “Charlie Brown’s parents having sex”. His debut album, The Warm Air Room is full of big bouncing sounds, and typical of the genre, could leave listeners wondering how to move to the music.

“Sometimes, dubstep and modern electronic music is not about dancing – it’s about the music being interesting,” says Stagga. “You get a culture where people just want to hear the vibrations – it can be a physical experience, a sound experience.”

Stagga’s sets have aired on the BBC and filled clubs across the globe. His tours have brought him everywhere from Belgium to Malta and Ukraine, and more recently in cities across America. But his June 17 gig at Backstage Live marks Stagga’s first set in Hong Kong as part of an Asian tour for The Warm Air Room.

“It’s not going to be a simple collection of the genre’s hits,” Stagga warns Time Out. It’ll be a night for the distinct sound of Stagga and his comrades.

Isak Ladegaard

Backstage Live Friday June 17