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: dub
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.
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…
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.
Released by Trojan Records in the UK in 1975, Ja-Gan quickly became a must-have long-player for dub enthusiasts and devotees of the melodica sound first popularised by Augustus Pablo two years earlier.
Despite crediting keyboard whizz Leslie Butler as the primary artist, the Harry Johnson-produced LP primarily showcased the talents of singer-turned melodica maestro Joe White, whose proficiency of the instrument rivalled that of his more widely celebrated contemporary, Augustus Pablo.
Remarkably, White also went unacknowledged on the front sleeve of ‘Dub Wise’, the Jamaican pressing of the LP, which instead credited the engineer responsible for mixing the set, Sylvan Morris!
2026 marks the 20th anniversary of Nightmares On Wax‘s (George Evelyn) seminal In a Space Outta Sound, as a dub clash with On-U Sound producer and mixing desk wizard Adrian Sherwood titled In a Space Outta Dub, revisioning eight of the 2006 album’s songs. While the original tunes remain recognizable, Sherwood adds his own visionary sonic signature full of humid warmth, languid rhythms, and sultry grooves
Opener “You Bliss” is a sonic redesign of “You Wish.” The original William Bell Stax guitar sample remains, but it’s submerged by smoky saxophone and an organ that sounds like it was lifted from the Doors’ LA Woman sessions. Sherwood’s trademark dread bassline is boosted, heavily reverbed, and echo-laden. It sounds quite…
Since its inception in 2002, independent label Soundway Records has unearthed coveted musical gems from far-flung corners of the world, with foundations that are rooted in meticulously sourced reissues. A collection of fourteen digital reggae, deep roots and dub rarities from the Nigerian underground, spotlighting a time when Jamaican reggae entwined with Nigerian styles, politics and consciousness, creating a bridge between Lagos and Kingston. Fight the Fire is a companion piece to Soundway’s seminal “Doing it in Lagos” and “Nigeria Special” compilations, celebrating the innovation and musical experimentation of Nigeria in the 80s. Features rare tracks from key figures of the time including Oby Onyioha (with a crucial Burning Spear cover) and Orits Williki.
For a band that has always cultivated a unique and idiosyncratic sound, New Age Doom appears to have fully mastered their craft on Angels Against Angels. The album demonstrates a confident command of arrangement and atmosphere, tactically marshalling diverse musical elements while seamlessly integrating multiple genres. At the same time, it advances a spiritual message rooted in equality, love and truth.
Sparkling with elements of jazz, experimental, electronic, progressive rock and dub, the record is elevated further by the unmistakable vocals and lyricism of H.R. (Human Rights), frontman of the legendary band Bad Brains. Angels Against Angels uproots disparate sonic textures and intricately fuses them with both playfulness…
Badawi was born Raz Mesinai in 1973 in Jerusalem. By spending a lot of time with Bedouins in the Sinai desert as a youngster, he picked up on their unique musical style.
When he reached the age of seven, he was taken under the wing of dervish sheik Murshid Hassan (of the Palestinian refugee camp of Balata), who taught the youngster all about exotic Middle Eastern drumming.
Soon he had mastered such percussive instruments as the bendir, zarb, and darbukka. After moving to New York City, he found himself immersed in the burgeoning NYC Academy of Underground DJs (which included DJ Spooky and a host of others) and changed his name to Badawai (which means “desert dweller” or simply “Bedouin”).
The Nakibembe Embaire Group’s self-titled debut album was one of the highlights of 2023. Nyege Nyege Tapes captured the disappearing East African tradition of the embaire, a giant wooden xylophone designed to be played by as many as eight musicians at a time. The instrument can be the social center of a village, placed in a deep pit to amplify what is already a powerful sound.
On its own, the embaire ensemble generates a huge amount of energy. Repeating, overlapping figures are a kind of proto-minimalism, Steve Reich without the precise, bookish glaze.
…The result is their live collaboration with Japanese live-sound engineer Naoyuki Uchida, Phantom Keys. Six men do their thing on the embaire, while Uchida applies his live-dub…