The Strangeness of Dub

Programme Fourteen

Channel One (Dissemination IV)

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.

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).

Produced by Edward George and Camilo Salazar for Morley Radio

Tracklist:

Sugar Minott On Sir Coxsone Outernational Sound System – Dancehall Style
Sugar Minott – Good Thing Going
The Sound Dimension – Mean Dub
The Mighty Diamonds – I Need A Roof
Sugar & Brentford All Stars – I Need A Roof
Well Charge – Roof Top Dub
Billy Eckstine – Blue Moon

Stephen Chen – Always Together (A Chinese Love Song)
Roland Alphonso & Beverleys All Stars – Dreamland
Impact All Stars – Ordinary Version (Take 3)
Stranger & Gladdy – Don’t Give Up The Fight
Roland Alphonso – Jah Shaky

Barry Brown – Far East
Barry Brown – Far East

Cyril X Diaz And His Orchestra – Tabu
The Gaylads – Africa
Stephany Samuels – Africa We Want To Go
Frankie Paul – Worries In The Dance
Sugar Minott & Captain Sinbad – Hard Time Pressure
Angela Prince – I Don’t Want To Be Ashame

Gregory Isaacs – Soon Forward
Gregory Isaacs – Soon Forward

Sugar Minott – Herbman Hustling
Eek A Mouse – Noah’s Ark

A version of this show was presented at ‘Step Forward: Sonic Visions’, at Ormside Projects in London on November 27, 2024.