In its opening moments, Blasé Saint seems easy to pigeonhole. “Lifelover” begins with the muted thump of a kick drum, a migrating flock of reversed percussion hits, and a keyboard line that sounds like an Angelo Badalamenti DX7 patch poached from some nerdy producer subreddit. Its palette, swaddled in an ASMR-ready mixture of cassette hiss and field recordings, gives “regulation dub techno.” But before you can get too comfortable, the song pulls you into its undertow; five minutes later, it spits you out in a wholly new place. Atonal loops bloom and fold into themselves, while the drums and synth, repeating on an infinite cycle, get subsumed by gigantic bass frequencies. It’s intense and impressive, dumping a familiar bag of tricks onto the table and rearranging…
Category: reggae
The 1970s was a truly glorious decade of reggae. While the likes of Bob Marley, Burning Spear and Culture powerfully highlighted political and social inequalities, and the message of Rasta, other artists, both in Jamaica and the UK, drew inspiration from the joys and pains of romantic love. The widespread popularity of love-themed reggae during this golden period is highlighted on this essential 2CD collection which brings together 46 of the most popular romantic reggae recordings ever to have seen issue.
Included are an array of major reggae hits, their number including ‘Silly Games’, ‘Tears On My Pillow’, ‘Three Times a Lady’, and ‘The Closer I Get to You’, performed by such celebrated exponents of the lovers style as Janet Kay,…
…At the BBC: The Complete Recordings 1979-1981 covers The Selecter’s glory years, from the first of two John Peel sessions in October 1979 (coinciding with their first-on-the-bill slot on the legendary first 2Tone tour, supporting Madness and The Specials) to an April 1981 performance on The Old Grey Whistle Test, recorded months before singer Pauline Black effectively called time on the band by leaving to pursue a solo career and acting ambitions (they’d officially split the year after). The 30-track set marks the first time that all the beloved 2Tone act’s BBC recordings have been released in one place. The eight live tracks taken from a December 1979 show in Paris supporting The Specials were released on 1992’s BBC Radio 1 Live in Concert CD…
In the summer of 1976, Bob Marley & The Wailers hit the UK shortly before the heatwave, in mid-June. They’d been touring Rastaman Vibration since April – breakthrough shows in the US and Europe – and in Britain, just a few months after the success of Live! and No Woman, No Cry, filled four nights and two matinees at
the Hammersmith Odeon, announcing that reggae was no niche novelty but a potent force. In the audience was future DJ Don Letts who in the linernotes here makes an impassioned case for that residency’s significance. “It made British kids who’d never stepped in a Caribbean household feel the hum of something deeper than rock or pop. Marley showed the world the spirituality, rebellion and beauty inside our culture.” Letts also asserts that reviewers of…
Continuing Doctor Bird’s comprehensive anthology series of Lee “Scratch” Perry-produced singles, Jungle Lion tracks the innovator’s studio output from the beginning of 1973, just before he established his storied Black Ark Studios and created much of his most celebrated work. During this era, he was making tracks that still sometimes bore a resemblance to older rocksteady rhythms, but he was pushing reggae firmly into the future through his studio experimentation, as well as his work with deejays and toasters such as Dillinger and Charlie Ace. While there are a few more traditionally sung love songs, most of the tracks with vocals feature playful, reverb-heavy toasting and chatting. Perry growls heavily on the truly wild “Jungle Lion,” one of his…
Since 1964, there have been numerous interpretations of The Beatles’ music. Stax, jazz, classical, Motown, country, Bing Crosby, Laibach, and easy listening have all had a go at Beatles cover albums. Mystic Liverpool: The Beatles’ Psychedelic Psongbook may be the most original, and after 60-some years, that is a huge accomplishment. Jah Wobble and his sons, John T and Charlie Wardle, have collaborated on a dub/drone version of Beatles songs, focusing on their more psychedelic tracks, which makes great sense.
…On paper, this might look like it would not work. The complete opposite is true. The use of traditional Chinese instruments, alongside Wobble’s distinct and trademark bass, creates an unusual yet fascinating take on these songs.
1973 was a pivotal time for Lee “Scratch” Perry, as it was the year he built his fabled Black Ark studio, where he created much of his most celebrated work, and he released Upsetters 14 Dub Blackboard Jungle, often noted as the first full-length dub album. Up until then, he worked as a freelance producer, often recording at King Tubby’s studio. Flashing Echo, part of Doctor Bird’s comprehensive series of Perry’s single productions, compiles one last batch of material before he had fully switched over to recording at Black Ark. During this period, Perry was working with deejays and toasters like Dillinger, I-Roy, and U-Roy as well as singers including Leo Graham, David Isaacs, and Junior Byles. Several of these tracks appeared as singles on Perry’s own Black…
The musician known as Gi Gi understands the magic of a slow burn. In his chillout room, sounds waft from unseen corners into the middle distance, hovering like smoke illuminated by a flashlight. Each of the Texas-born, Melbourne-based producer’s albums has the hazy quality of a sense memory, the unexpected pleasant feeling of deja vu on a spring morning. His tunes seem to curl outward until they take up the whole screen, dazzling, pastel-tinted arrays that organize themselves without drawing attention to the process. Suddenly, it’s there, as are you, and everything feels locked into a specific but fleeting place.
For the better part of a decade, Gi Gi has been a reliably prolific source of foggy downtempo…
In the late 1970s, Neil Fraser, AKA Mad Professor, and his wife moved into a house in Croydon. “The normal thing would be to put in some chairs, a table,” he said in a podcast last year. Instead, the legendary dub producer fitted his living room with a four-track mixing desk and his collection of homemade gear, thus marking the beginning of the studio and label Ariwa Sounds.
The early years of Ariwa were captured in a 1984 album, which was reissued by Melodies International in 2023. Now, the two labels reunite to document the sounds that followed. This double compilation isn’t an attempt at a greatest hits collection, nor a chronological history, but an insight into the label’s expansive output between 1984 and 2026, featuring big names…
The jig is up. The act behind the most bewildering ambient techno of the past 15 years is not a shadowy syndicate or group of evil geniuses. It’s actually just Izaak Schlossman, who started the project back in Seattle as part of a crew called Aught. The proliferation of aliases, and the artist’s eventual move to San Francisco — where he started the synth-pop band Loveshadow — caused lingering confusion. No one could decide where Topdown Dialectic was based, or how many people it was, or if people were even making the music, instead of algorithms or bots. But now the 20,000 r/TheOverload followers who couldn’t sleep at night can rest easy: We found our guy.
For those not in the know, Topdown Dialectic was originally a faceless project putting out…
Thirty years since the release of their breakthrough self-titled album and lead singer Bradley Nowell’s passing, sunburnt reggae punk rockers Sublime are back with an hour-long love-letter to their past, and their home. The band proudly states in their 1996 chill out track “Doin Time”, that they’re “qualified to represent the L.B.C”, a statement that has stood the test of time considering how little they have faltered.
All of the same laid-back stoner rock, soaked in sunlight, Mexican beer and good times, but now, however, there’s a new man at the helm. Jakob Nowell, son of founding member Bradley Nowell, has had been passed the torch seamlessly and with a respect to the band’s past, that makes Until the Sun Explodes even more enjoyable.
The innovations of Berlin’s Basic Channel in the mid-’90s led to a whole new way of thinking about dance music, introducing countless producers to the possibilities of reverb and delay. Producers have been working off the template they set for dub techno ever since. Less often imitated is the duo’s work as Rhythm & Sound, where they slowed their music to reggae tempos and hewed closer to the Jamaican innovations that informed their trippy production tricks. This sound is having a small moment right now. Stuttgart’s Ghost Dubs has made a career of it, both solo and with a fired-up Kevin Richard Martin; Brussels’ Carrier shaped it into cavernous forms on last year’s awesome Rhythm Immortal; all the while, co-originator and close Rhythm & Sound collaborator…
To say that history looms over Horror is just another way of saying that it’s a Mekons record. The globally scattered collective, which originally convened in Leeds, England, in the late 1970s, has long drawn lines connecting the warmongers of our time to the dominant creeps of centuries past. The first words they sing on Horror depict the departure on Christmas 1654 of the frigate Gloucester. Tasked with vanquishing Spanish control of the West Indies, the warship gave up and settled for conquering Jamaica. Oliver Cromwell, Margaret Thatcher, pick your present villain — they all work for the same company.
Horror, released in April 2025, maneuvers in vintage Mekons fashion between the planting season of our discontent and the present,…
A unique and brilliant collaboration between the legendary dub/reggae pioneer and German electronic production duo Mouse on Mars (aka Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma). Lee “Scratch” Perry’s last ever official album project before his passing in 2019. Recorded in 3 days at Mouse on Mars’ Paraverse Studio in Berlin in 2019.
Lee, Jan and Andi conducted a revolving cast of musicians and collaborators throughout the complex’s different rooms and spaces.
Spatial, No Problem. finds the artists breaking new ground – the one thing Lee was sure of was that this shouldn’t be just another reggae album. It covers everything from krautrock, ambient, dub, jazz, New Orleans brass and much more.
“We hardly spoke about what we were doing.
Fela Kuti has been rediscovered all around the globe in the last 20 years in ever changing inspirational ways. Probably there is no major city in Europe or the US today without an ensemble that heavily references Fela Kuti.
…Fela Kuti in Dub takes us to one of Germanys hubs of Fela Kuti admiration: a small studio in the bluecollar district Untergiesing in Munich. This is the workspace of drummer, producer, dub fanatic, and DJ: Captain Yossarian. The studio complex is home to an illustrious group of musicians: Krautrock pioneers Embryo, Poets of Rhythm mastermind Jan Weissenfeldt, Franz Ferdinands guitar player Nick Mc Carthy or local (also Fela Kuti loving) Express Brassband who all work here. Occasionally bands visiting Munich…
Since leaving Public Image Ltd, Jah Wobble has been a remarkably prolific artist. He has recently teamed up with Jon Klein, former Siouxsie and The Banshees and Specimen guitarist, for their second collaborative effort. This album is more post-punk than dub. In fact, although Jah Wobble is famous for his dub records, with Automated Paradise, he is returning to his punk roots for a brilliant album.
The title track is the closest thing to dub on the album, and it is a nice short reminder of what Wobble does and does extremely well. But with Klein in the picture, he, for the first time in years, returns to post-punk and punk. He does it with ease, with the perfect vocals and lyrics. Klein provides him the musical support, and it is full steam ahead.