Dub has such an unassuming name for something so profoundly
destabilising. Just three letters: ‘dee’
‘you’ ‘bee’ put together to
create one short syllable. The very sound of the word
triggers associations with rubber bumpers or lips, objects
that create contact, absorb impact. The movement of
one’s mouth when pronouncing the word seems to
replicate the fluid bounce of dub’s essential
bass. It’s a little word that conjures a very
particular image: a person approaches a doorway carrying
music, dub is the door lintel which trips that person
up and causes the music to fly into the air –
it floats to the ground reconfigured.
Dub is to music as Picasso’s Guitar (1912)
is to sculpture. Both approaches shared a desire to
radically rethink and consequently to deconstruct form.
Dub has acted as a revolutionary, viral element since
its beginnings in early seventies Jamaica. The masters
of the art, King Tubby, Lee Perry, U-Roy and their peers
dismantled reggae into its constituent parts. Upon reassembly
these sonic scientists deliberately omitted some pieces
and altered the shape and interaction of others. What
was once solid (and what could be more solid than reggae’s
bass-heavy template?) was transformed into echoes and
absences. Recognisable elements from the original version
of a track might suddenly appear and just as suddenly
fade away again: vocals became spirits, basslines shadows,
guitars apparitions. There’s transmogrification
at work in dub, give it another name and it’s
voodoo (or any other religion); the implication is clear:
that which is, passes into other forms. As well as the
potential for metaphysical contemplation, dub raises
questions about the purpose of music. Should its primal
energy be spent in the achievement of forward motion
and the delivery of catchy melodies? Or can music be
used as a force to destabilise reality and thereby make
the listener question surroundings, relationships, anything
in fact that might otherwise be taken for granted? Don’t
be complacent, dub seems to say.
Dub’s influence has registered in a wide range
of music including Arthur Russell’s longform disco,
PIL’s Metal Box album and most of Jah
Wobble’s subsequent releases, Berlin techno, Jungle,
most of ~Scape’s output, ambient dub and so on
and on (and on). In the mid nineties it seemed de rigueur
to make reference to its influence, but in recent years
dub’s profile has reduced, though its techniques
are still key tools for many producers. Dub is all too
easy a name to conjure, but to subject one’s music
to such deconstruction convincingly is another matter
entirely.
And so to Meat Beat Manifesto’s ...In Dub
in which Jack Dangers subjects the techno template to
viral infiltration, though in a manner which diverges
significantly from dub’s original methodologies.
Where dub originated in instrumental B-sides, In
Dub features DJ Collage at the mic on a number
of tracks. He brings a running, urgent tone to proceedings,
but his presence is flesh and sweat real, rather than
ethereal and almost absent. The rhythmic chassis of
most of the twelve tracks is similarly solid, with pleasingly
heavy bass and driving beats. The result is something
more solid and more aggressive, busier and less spacious
than archetypal dub. It’s in the rest of the sonic
architecture that MBM stay truer to dub’s spirit.
They mix and match a wide range of disparate foreign
elements to create a melting pot of human and mechanical
voices, jingles, sounds and samples. These float in
and away gently or suddenly, repeat again and again
or disappear almost before they arrive.
Think of In Dub as the sonic equivalent of
Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory able to pick
up a huge range of signals from across the firmament.
The myriad of stars, galaxies and quasars beyond the
earth’s atmosphere are however drowned out by
mankind’s signals bouncing off the ionosphere
radio waves, voices, stray snatches of music, political
broadcasts, military communications and so on. It's
an even noisier, more intrusive world than the one reflected
by Jamaica's dub pioneers. Perhaps that's why the dub
loving Rastafarians live on a space station in William
Gibson's Neuromancer...
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