In music nothing excites me quite like a non-reggae artist releasing an album simply titled "In Dub." Sometimes the idea is better than the execution. I'm a sucker and will always check it out just in case there are one or two tracks that really stand out. Sure a couple of these are loose interpretations of this theme. I-LP-O in Dub, has that 'in dub' in the artist name, Beatundercontrol is already pretty much a dub group, Mark Nelson's outing is from "In Daylight dub." On the second mix Pizzicato Five's EP is subtitled "Combinaison Spaciale EP: Pizzicato Five In Dub" and Jeremy Taylor was listed as "Miles Davis in Dub" when I originally downloaded it - which is not the correct name of the album. Still, they all have that same theme and are quite enjoyable on their own. A few artists are on these mixes twice because they have more than one album titled as "in dub."
00:00 Serge Gainsbourg - Drifter's Dub
03:32 Beatundercontrol - Neutron Dub
10:03 NIC in DUB - Twilight Circus Norge Head Charge
14:45 Sandoz - Chant To Jah
21:47 Almamegretta - Alma Dub
27:06 Dread - Blood Into Dub
34:24 William S Burroughs - Virus B-23 (Cities of The Red Night)
37:58 Nocturnal Emissions - Levitation Dub
42:58 The Pop Group - 3:38 (Dennis Bovell Dub Version)
47:38 Panda Bear, Sonic Boom & Adrian Sherwood - Whirlpool Dub (Reset in Dub version)
52:17 Mark Nelson - Quarry A
57:59 HiM - Six
68:57 Jeremy Taylor - Flamenco Sketches (dub)
There's a quote I really like from Marc Hollander (of Crammed Discs and the band Aksak Maboul. In his "Baker's Dozen" at The Quietus, he talks about Can's "Ethnological Forgery" series and other examples of "imaginary world music". He says, "When you try to do something and you fail it becomes something else, and maybe it’s interesting."
ReplyDeleteThat's one of my favorite things about "cod reggae" and the post-punk dub stuff that you've shared recently. Often it's not dub in the conventional Jamaican sense. And as you say here, sometimes the concept is better than the execution. But when an artist tries and fails to make dub (or their idea of dub), they sometimes make something else which is unexpected and interesting in its own right! I think to some artists "Dub" means "I'm going to avoid conventional production techniques and go against what I've been trained to think sounds right."
Well said! Yes, this stuff stretches what is expected when you hear the word dub. Yet isn't that the purpose of dub to take a piece of music and give it to a producer to play with studio trickery in all its forms to create something new, something more sparse? Yeah, sometimes it just doesn't work or comes across flat, though there are some examples where it really works well.
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