FRI., SEPTEMBER 01, 2006
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Ghosts in the Machine: Dub and Electronic Music
by Philip Sherburne
The recent punk and post-punk renaissance has served as a reminder of those genres' debt to dub and reggae, from the Jamaican roots of Stiff Little Fingers and the Clash to PiL, the Slits and This Heat. But dub reggae wasn't just a sound; it was an approach to using studio technology. Dub's spring delays and rickety spatial effects may today seem quaint — a once-crisp hi-hat, dubbed to distress when bounced from a four-track straightjacket to a mangy, 16-track composition, can sound like the hiss of a cheap cassette tape — but in their day they represented an almost mystical sort of sonic futurism. Today it's techno, another genre with self-consciously futurist roots, that best preserves the vestiges of vintage mixing-desk trickery pioneered by a handful of tinkerers in the '60s and '70s.
But Jamaica's dub legends didn't just invent the remix (sorry, Diddy); they invented an entirely new way of imagining the implied space within recorded music. If Phil Spector came up with the famous "wall of sound," King Tubby and his protégés dressed their sonic sets with virtual thickets — dense but porous arrangements through which the listener had to bob and duck, dodging barbed guitar and dry, craggy drumbeats. Dub arrangements took the simplest backbone of drums, bass and skanking guitar, fleshed out with wisps of keyboard and vocals and turned it into something liquid, undulating and psychedelic.
Perhaps dub's most important innovation was the idea that the recording isn't simply the faithful reproduction of a live performance, but a hyperreal space of multiple possibilities existing in parallel. In a typical King Tubby track, a rhythmic bed of drums and bass lies dry and spongy while a single snare hit goes ricocheting off into a cathedral-sized room. In the crudest sort of acoustic reality, of course, there would be no way for a lone drum to go spatially renegade, but the application of reverb or delay creates an acoustic illusion so convincing that it becomes a kind of phantasm, the trace of an alternate dimension. Lee "Scratch" Perry, long considered as much madman as genius, is alleged to have crossed Kingston tapping at the ground with a hammer, possibly to release the spirits locked inside; I can't think of a better metaphor for the way that dub technology releases the spirits hidden inside recorded music, turning a dead, magnetic document into a box of ghosts.
The most obvious place to listen for dub's influence in techno is Berlin's Basic Channel collective. In the late '80s and early '90s they served as Germany's key link to Detroit's techno community, sharing an affinity for coolly motorik rhythms and buzzing synthesizer chords. Basic Channel's twist on the tradition was to reduce techno to a series of suggestions — instead of drums, you heard only whoomping pulses; once-distinct chords lapped over each other like colliding waves at a river's mouth. Formally, their music leaned heavily on dub's exaggerated backbeat, but in a broader sense it constituted an update of dub's interest in launching a streamlined, pop-music form into elliptical orbits moving further away from the source with every pass.
Early in this decade, Basic Channel leveraged their mastering and distribution resources to reissue a goodly part of the back catalogue of Wackies, a Bronx-based label that in the late '70s and '80s released a stream of roots-oriented, sonically inventive singles featuring vocalists like Steve "Bullwackies" Barnes and onetime Massive Attack collaborator Horace Andy. Wackies Sampler Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 both provide excellent introductions to the roots of the Basic Channel sound. But it's with Basic Channel's Rhythm & Sound project that the past, present and future of dub really come together.
Typically for the shadow-loving Basic Channel, it's difficult to say exactly who's involved — doubly so given that sister albums W/ the Artists and The Versions are respectively credited to Various Artists and Rhythm & Sound. Both showcase simulated roots reggae; the former offers full vocal versions featuring singers like Cornel Campbell and Paul St. Hilaire, aka Tikiman, while the latter attacks the singers like a secretary swabbing at typos with correction fluid, leaving only the faintest traces of the original vocals amidst so much gunk and stickum. 1998's Showcase follows a similar format, but presents both vocal and instrumental dubs back-to-back on the same album.
As for the future of dub, look no further than Rhythm & Sound's See Mi Yah Remixes, which offers up See Mi Yah to a diverse crew of remixers including Carl Craig, Tikiman, Vainqueur, Sleeparchive, Vladislav Delay, François K. and Soundstream (aka Soundhack). Not all of the remix album's contributors are as dub-obsessed as Basic Channel, and it's precisely that friction that makes the album spark as it does. There's more variation than you'll hear in the Rhythm & Sound records proper: Vainqueur smears "Rise and Praise" into a blurry sunrise while Substance turns "Let Jah Love Come" into a heartbreakingly lovely swirl of bright keyboards and multitracked tenor.
Carl Craig's remix of "Poor People Must Work" probably deserves a column of its own; the latest in a string of masterful remixes from the Detroit veteran, it's simply one of the best tracks of 2006 in any genre. As always, Craig grounds everything with a dully thudding kick drum, allowing scraps of percussion and filtered chords to provide the forward motion. By the track's final third, all hell breaks loose as Craig begins cutting up fragments of the original — dry snares, truncated syllables, intakes of breath — into stuttering staccato patterns that bash away at the time signature itself, doing their best to upend the downbeat. But the backbeat saves the day as a blue-green chord, that minor third without which dub reggae would lose its very heart and soul, clangs away. You can almost hear Lee Perry hammering at the ground.
But Jamaica's dub legends didn't just invent the remix (sorry, Diddy); they invented an entirely new way of imagining the implied space within recorded music. If Phil Spector came up with the famous "wall of sound," King Tubby and his protégés dressed their sonic sets with virtual thickets — dense but porous arrangements through which the listener had to bob and duck, dodging barbed guitar and dry, craggy drumbeats. Dub arrangements took the simplest backbone of drums, bass and skanking guitar, fleshed out with wisps of keyboard and vocals and turned it into something liquid, undulating and psychedelic.
Perhaps dub's most important innovation was the idea that the recording isn't simply the faithful reproduction of a live performance, but a hyperreal space of multiple possibilities existing in parallel. In a typical King Tubby track, a rhythmic bed of drums and bass lies dry and spongy while a single snare hit goes ricocheting off into a cathedral-sized room. In the crudest sort of acoustic reality, of course, there would be no way for a lone drum to go spatially renegade, but the application of reverb or delay creates an acoustic illusion so convincing that it becomes a kind of phantasm, the trace of an alternate dimension. Lee "Scratch" Perry, long considered as much madman as genius, is alleged to have crossed Kingston tapping at the ground with a hammer, possibly to release the spirits locked inside; I can't think of a better metaphor for the way that dub technology releases the spirits hidden inside recorded music, turning a dead, magnetic document into a box of ghosts.
The most obvious place to listen for dub's influence in techno is Berlin's Basic Channel collective. In the late '80s and early '90s they served as Germany's key link to Detroit's techno community, sharing an affinity for coolly motorik rhythms and buzzing synthesizer chords. Basic Channel's twist on the tradition was to reduce techno to a series of suggestions — instead of drums, you heard only whoomping pulses; once-distinct chords lapped over each other like colliding waves at a river's mouth. Formally, their music leaned heavily on dub's exaggerated backbeat, but in a broader sense it constituted an update of dub's interest in launching a streamlined, pop-music form into elliptical orbits moving further away from the source with every pass.
Early in this decade, Basic Channel leveraged their mastering and distribution resources to reissue a goodly part of the back catalogue of Wackies, a Bronx-based label that in the late '70s and '80s released a stream of roots-oriented, sonically inventive singles featuring vocalists like Steve "Bullwackies" Barnes and onetime Massive Attack collaborator Horace Andy. Wackies Sampler Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 both provide excellent introductions to the roots of the Basic Channel sound. But it's with Basic Channel's Rhythm & Sound project that the past, present and future of dub really come together.
Typically for the shadow-loving Basic Channel, it's difficult to say exactly who's involved — doubly so given that sister albums W/ the Artists and The Versions are respectively credited to Various Artists and Rhythm & Sound. Both showcase simulated roots reggae; the former offers full vocal versions featuring singers like Cornel Campbell and Paul St. Hilaire, aka Tikiman, while the latter attacks the singers like a secretary swabbing at typos with correction fluid, leaving only the faintest traces of the original vocals amidst so much gunk and stickum. 1998's Showcase follows a similar format, but presents both vocal and instrumental dubs back-to-back on the same album.
As for the future of dub, look no further than Rhythm & Sound's See Mi Yah Remixes, which offers up See Mi Yah to a diverse crew of remixers including Carl Craig, Tikiman, Vainqueur, Sleeparchive, Vladislav Delay, François K. and Soundstream (aka Soundhack). Not all of the remix album's contributors are as dub-obsessed as Basic Channel, and it's precisely that friction that makes the album spark as it does. There's more variation than you'll hear in the Rhythm & Sound records proper: Vainqueur smears "Rise and Praise" into a blurry sunrise while Substance turns "Let Jah Love Come" into a heartbreakingly lovely swirl of bright keyboards and multitracked tenor.
Carl Craig's remix of "Poor People Must Work" probably deserves a column of its own; the latest in a string of masterful remixes from the Detroit veteran, it's simply one of the best tracks of 2006 in any genre. As always, Craig grounds everything with a dully thudding kick drum, allowing scraps of percussion and filtered chords to provide the forward motion. By the track's final third, all hell breaks loose as Craig begins cutting up fragments of the original — dry snares, truncated syllables, intakes of breath — into stuttering staccato patterns that bash away at the time signature itself, doing their best to upend the downbeat. But the backbeat saves the day as a blue-green chord, that minor third without which dub reggae would lose its very heart and soul, clangs away. You can almost hear Lee Perry hammering at the ground.
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