The Idler

The great space men of dub

Jon Fortgang on dub, the mutant science

Lee “Scratch” Perry once claimed to be a machine imitating a human being. The early beat writers sought meaning through destruction. The philosopher Schopenhauer believed that the lowest bass notes of the orchestra were a direct expression of the Will, the malign force which underpins existence. All of them, in their own way, could have been talkin’ bout dub.

This is after all, a music riddled with contradiction. Spacious yet intimate. Chilled yet intense. Unlike its parent reggae, which is extrovert and exuberant, dub is dark, deeply introspective and run through with dread. Although irrevocably associated with weed, in its use of reverb and womb like FX, dub is as amnioitc as it is narcotic. In essence, this is music at its most simple - no lyrics, no choruses, no tunes if you don’t fancy ‘em - but its layered textures and eldritch ambience are deeply disorientating. It’s weird shit.

Largely credited with inventing dub is Osbourne Ruddock, King Tubby to his respectful subjects. He began experimenting with sound towards the end of the Sixties while working at Kingston’s Treasue Island Studios. By 1974 he’d set up on his own and began working on tracks by Augustus Pablo, Yabby U and Horace Andy. He’d take a tune, strip it down, treat the rythm as if it were a vocal, stoke up the bass until it threatened to consume everything in its path, then drop in some tiny aspect of the original, maybe just a single cord or vocal tick, before scattering the remnants to the wind. His Home Town HI-Fi Soundsystem was the first in Jamaica to enable what was in effect live mixing. Legend has it that playing out with toaster U Roy, Tubby could take just a handful of tunes and, phasing, fading, stretching and straining the raw elements, convince audiences they’d heard forty or fifty rather than four or five different tracks. The result is a vertigo-inducing mix of the spectral and the visceral: melancholy notes stretched to the point of transparency chime across spinning hi-hats, while deep below a bassline the size of a planet slowly implodes. The king was shot dead in 1989. Nobody knows why.

Central to dub’s turning of the inisde out is the use of the mixing desk as an instrument in its own right, and, along with King Tubby, the great magnetic manipulator has always been Lee “Scratch” Perry. Although radically different in approach - Tubby’s mixes are capacious and airy, while Perry’s are so dense you need a lighthouse to find your way home - the two of them worked together to produce the awesome ‘Blackboard Jungle Dub’ before Perry launched his own Black Ark Studio, cast off his hinges and set sail for the land that forgot time.
It’s impossible to guage Perry’s influence, both as a producer and as a musician. The list of titles produced throughout the Seventies in his archaic , four track studio reads like an encyclopedia of reggae’s finest hour: Junior Marvin’s Police And Thieves, Max Romeo’s War In Babylon, plus countless tracks by The Upsetters all resonate to Perry’s bounced down tape loops. But life in the world of Scratch is unlike life as it is conventionally understood, and despite the fact that for ten years he hadn’t been able to put a foot wrong, in 1979 Perry spent two days walking backwards around Kingston, and then burnt the Black Ark, mastertapes and all. He claimed he’d seen Island boss Chris Blackwell drinking the blood of a feshly killed chicken.

The period 1973-9 marked the apotheosis of pre-digital dub. At the height of his power was Augustus Pablo, who wielded his melodics like a divining rod., Prince Far I had a voice so deep, it’s a wonder his organs were able to function. And Keith Hudson, Horace Andy, Burning Spear, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Scientist, Prince (later King) Jammy and early Black Uhuru all produced records of awesome power and weight. Joe Gibbs’ African Dub Chapter 3 cemented punk’s alliance with dub’s ideological and musical intimacy, and before long, The Clash, PiL and Killing Joke had all incorporated dub’s messianic dynamic into their work.

The way dub gets talked about - all military metaphors and willing submission is apt, but at its heart is a viral quality, true to which the the current digital strain was spawned. Digi-dub’s rhythms are at once cleaner and more dense. Its basslines operate a policy of pre-emptive counter attack. Its surface is littered with stangely beautiful industrial waste. Adrian Sherwood is modern dub’s most prominent practioner, but Mad Professor, The On-U Sound Collective, Rootsman, Armagideon and Zion Train’s Universal Egg label are all dedicated to the pursuit of hugeness. And much so called post-rock - Scorn, Laika, Tortoise - has dub crawling beneath its skin.

It’s in the nature of this music to fuck with everything. Nothing is more reviled in dub than order. It’s a mutant science for which space, time and logic are afflictions of which we need to be cured. Which may be why, living in a time when time itself has become such a big deal, dub, which is literally and metaphorically timeless, will always be the language of the future..ure..ure.