The legend goes that when dub madman/producer Lee Perry was but an ankle-biter, he threw some rocks down a gully and minded how they echoed for use many years later. Okay, that may not make for musical lore as visceral as, say, Robert Johnson selling his soul at the crossroads to learn how to play the blues, but that doesn't mean that dub reggae hasn't been the most influential musical genre of the last 40 years.
In much the way that the blues suffused jazz, folk, rock, and heavy metal in the half century previous, reggae's emphasis on the producer and the infallibility (and infinite recyclability) of a hot beat have been crucial. Solid enough for sweaty dance floors yet open enough for evolution and interpretation, the production techniques of Perry, Sir Coxsone Dodd, King Tubby, and others were quickly taken up by everyone from Brian Eno and Tom Moulton to Johnny Rotten and Timbaland. Dub's scientific sound continues to underpin disco, punk, new wave, noise, ambient, hiphop, dancehall, house, techno, and remixes of any sort.
Fisherman Style (Blood & Fire), a two-disc set recapitulating and recasting a 30-year-old Lee Perry production into the 21st century, pays tribute to Perry's ability to echo still. Taken from the now-hallowed Heart of the Congos album (which Island Records unbelievably scrapped in 1977), it showcases both the "Fisherman" beat's pliancy and indeterminable nature, to where each take on the riddim perceives something different. A Caribbean Sea–deep bass line mixes with a rattle that skitters across the stereo field like a flat stone across the waters, with Cedric Myton's tear-rending falsetto and Roydel "Ashanti" Johnson's gravelly bass harmony melding the sacred and profane (think a Curtis Mayfield and Barry White duet).
The edits for each version here were rendered by dub scholars Mauritz von Oswald and Mark Ernestus from Berlin's Chain Reaction, and they deftly stretch and compress time accordingly: Myton's mewls, Johnson's yowls, phased tracers of cymbal, and the zombie-cow moos in the original buoy both the next-generation voices and legendary pipes on display. Old-school voices like Big Youth (winded but charitable), Horace Andy (whispery), and Gregory Isaacs (his smooth croon completely shot) meditate on themes of love, steadfastness, and biblical teaching (and, subsequently, aging) as do the next generation of singers like Mykal Rose and Luciano. Two discs is a tad long for any beat, but it shows the resiliency of Perry's productions through time.
The legend behind another Perry production goes that when the Heart of the Congos album failed to find release, the Congos split with a new manager. Said manager's previous clients, Zimbabwean expats Seke Molenga and Kalo Kawongolo, were thus stranded in Jamaica, strangers in a strange land. They headed to Perry's Black Ark studio to speak that common musical language and the resulting African Roots (Trojan) is prime-era Perry (meaning it sounds both earthy and extremely muddied). What makes it such a fascinating listen 30 years on is how the two separated cultures find a common ground in dub. The Zimbabweans chant in their native tongue, but play sax in the Fela tradition. "Mengieb" and "Masanga" are the most fascinating amalgams: the bright, undeniable strut of their horn lines meet the more lugubrious, lethargic shuffles of the heavily-lidded house band, both sides pushing and pulling until a middle ground is attained. Substantial chunks of Afro-pop, slinky soul, and free-jazz blats bob to the surface of this dub stew.
Rhythm & Sound, von Oswald and Ernestus's main project, also craft 21st-century riddims that are similarly open-ended. Last year, they released versions of a track "See Mi Yah" with singers like Willi Williams and Paul St. Hilaire and earlier this year they pressed up remixes of said versions, collected on a single disc released on Burial Mix. Vladislav Delay opens even deeper canyons of echo on "Truly," while Carl Craig emphasizes the bass for the dance floor. François K.'s speedy "Lightning Storm" would've sounded cheesy even a decade ago, but Chilean Ricardo Villalobos offers a most bewildered reimagining of "Let We Go." Known best for emulating k-holes in his house productions, Villalobos's bass sloshes like the Sargasso Sea, brass pips and repeats like a lost Steve Reich piece, and volts of electricity slither up Jacob's ladder. While not dub in the classical sense, the track sounds like a freefall through time and space, not unlike a rock thrown off a cliff.
editor@thestranger.com
