The Strangeness of Dub - Ep10

Programme Ten

Genealogies of Rock Against Racism

Presented live at The Barbican in July 26, 2022

Genealogies of Rock Against Racism is a musical journey, a tracing of moments in the lines of descent and dissent that lead to, and exceed, the formation of Rock Against Racism, whose locations are the interrelated spaces of the plantation, the death camp, and the urban spaces of post war Afro Asian settlement and struggle, whose themes are mimesis and ambivalence, and whose wide-ranging musical selection tells stories of deep listening and also gives sonance to a critical silence in the sound of RAR.

Edward George is a writer, researcher, and presenter of Black Audio Film Collective’s ground-breaking science fiction documentary Last Angel of History. Edward is a founder of Black Audio Film Collective (1982-1998), the multimedia duo Flow Motion (1996-present), and the electronic music group Hallucinator (1998-present).

Dub is strange. A musical process and a sub-genre formed in the early 1970s and pioneered by Clement Dodd, Sylvan Morris, Lee Perry, King Tubby, Scientist, Jah Shaka and The Mad Professor, dub takes place through a kind of violence, an act of reducing archival audio documents to fragments and traces, yet is associated, in its sound system context, with communal reverie and meditative states.

A marginal music and a music of margins, first and most enduringly located on the ‘b side’, the underside, of phonographic recordings, dub is a sub genre of reggae music, subordinate and secondary to song-writing, musical performance and recording. And yet more so than reggae song writing, vocal or musical performance, dub’s influence reverberates across other genres of electronic music, even while never quite comprising a genre of its own.

Dub is also a sonic process, a way of making new music from existing music that is always present in all forms of electronically recorded music, as that which is waiting to be excavated and discovered for the first time. You can hear dub process in late 20th century and 21st popular electronic dance music, in the 80’s hip hop productions of Marley Marl and the Bomb Squad, in the techno of Basic Channel and Mika Vaino, in dubstep and drum and bass, and you can hear its conceptual pre-figurations in jazz and the avant garde music of Cage and Stockhausen.

And yet, in spite or perhaps because of its broad cultural resonance, dub has at its heart a concern with ideas of emptiness and silence, being and presence, space and repetition, and these ideas intersect with themes, especially in reggae, of Diaspora, and ‘race’, history and memory, longing and loss.

Join Edward George, on a journey into reggae, dub, versions and versioning that draws on critical theory, social history, a deep and wide cross-genre musical selection, and live dub mixing.

Tracklist:

Mahalia Jackson – Troubles of the World
Chick Webb & His Orchestra featuring Ella Fitzgerald – A Tisket, A Tasket
Bessie Smith with Louis Armstrong & His Orchestra – St. Louis Blues
Artie Shaw & His Orchestra – Nightmare
Paul Robeson – Song of the Partisans, aka Song of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
Otis Rush – Double Trouble, Take 1
Roy & Enid – Rocking Time
Buster’s All Stars – Rock Steady
Buster’s All Stars – Seven Wonders of the World
X-O-Dus – English Black Boys
Otis Rush – Double Trouble
Eric Clapton – Double Trouble
Talat Mahmood & Shamshad Begum – Milte Hi Ankhen
Balbir & Dalbir Singh Khanpur & Bhunjangy Group – Nach Nach Pao Bhangray
Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan – Dam Mast Mast
Horace Andy – Government Dub
Upsetters – Bird in Hand
The Special AKA – Ghost Town
The Clash – The Magnificent Seven
Public Enemy – Welcome to the Terrordome
The Specials – Racist Friend

Produced by Edward George and Camilo Salazar

Recorded at the Barbican by Camilo Salazar for Morley Radio