Genre
Born in Kingston by taking things away: the vocal goes, the bass stays, the echo decides the rest. Proof that a studio is an instrument.
5 articles
No articles with these tags
Genre Dub
Spring reverb
Hammond Type 4
A spring inside a cabinet, put there to make a living room sound like a church. Knock the cabinet and the speakers went off like thunder, and for twenty years that thunder was a fault to be fixed.
Artist pick Dub
Kevin Richard Martin
The Bug
In 2019 Bandcamp asked him what he was listening to. Kevin Richard Martin came back with ten releases sorted into four headings: beats, riffs, drones, heavenly voices. Four of those picks, with the reason he gave, and one that barely exists anywhere else.
Genre Dub
British dub
Sound systems and home studios
In London dub did not arrive as a genre to import but as a trade to rebuild at home: first on the sound systems of the neighbourhoods, then in a front room in Thornton Heath with a second-hand tape machine.
Selection Dub
Scientist vs Prince Jammy
Between 1979 and 1982 a run of Jamaican records put two engineers against each other on the sleeve. The duel was the least reliable part, and the real prize was whose name stayed on the label.
Monograph Dub
King Tubby
How a Kingston sound engineer turned the mixing desk into an instrument, and invented a genre.
Dub starts as a useful mistake. In late sixties Jamaica, engineers work out that an instrumental version on the B side fills a dance as well as the song does, and that removing the vocal leaves room for everything else. King Tubby and Lee Perry turn that discovery into a method: the mixing desk becomes the lead instrument, played by moving faders while the tape runs.
It never really left. Bass pushed to the front, reverb used as space rather than as an effect, drums that come and go: those choices turn up in English post punk, in jungle, in a good deal of the electronic music made since the nineties. What we gather here follows that passage, from the rooms in Kingston to everyone who kept working by subtraction.