You could tell this wasn’t a normal dance party because the music kept doing something strange: stopping. The record would spin backward, the dancers would cheer, the D.J. would pause, and then the song would start again, from the top. This crowd-teasing technique  the rewind  has long been a major element of reggae concerts and parties. And as a few hundred dancers were reminded on Friday night, it also lives on in the reggae-influenced electronic genre known as dubstep, which has sprouted around London over the last few years.

The location was Love, a subterranean nightclub in Greenwich Village. The party was Dub War, a monthly get-together for the obsessed and the curious. And Friday’s headliner was D1, a dubstep producer and D.J. from Fulham, in West London; the gig was billed as his American debut.

On paper the labyrinth of British dance genres and microgenres can seem hopelessly complicated. But at Love D1 emphasized the basics, and he got a big cheer every time he dropped one of the monstrous bass lines that dubstep is known for. Although “bass line” scarcely seems like the right term: the timbres are scrambled and the tones are obliterated; instead of a melodic groove, you get a huge, serrated blob.

Dubstep is one more aftershock of an explosion that happened in the early 1990s, when British producers drew from electronic dance music and dance-hall reggae to create a furiously syncopated genre called jungle  and, later, drum and bass. Since then the sound has been mutating, spinning off new genres as producers and D.J.s change their priorities: hot declaration versus cool abstraction; voices versus beats; fits and starts versus nonstop dancing.