Toop Ocean of Sound

115 ocean of sound make music that can make wrongs right. I was getting help from God, through space,through the sky, through the firma- ment, through the earth, through the wind, through the fire. I got- supportthrough the weather to make space music." Lee Perry's spelf When I clap my hand, duppy appear to me from coast to coast, flying through the night post and through treyholes. SometimeS they melt the key, if-the key is in the keyhole, in a puff ofsmoke --PffffffffL~ ~ When I cut a Stench-Fart, it so loud that it bring up volcano lava, and is more dangerous than a hurricane ... Say "hi" to the lovers of Christ, and "bye" to the lovers of the devil. 'cause I kill the devil with my spiritual leveL MXR Armagideon War. Electrical machine, computer man, the mighty Upsetter, the ghost in the machine. Mad Perry, lightniiJ.g head master, breaker of doom. Dr Fu Manchu, black Fu Manchu. Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! This is a musical curse. Blessed are the Poor, and cursed are the Rich. Hic Hoc; Hic Hoc, Yak Yak. It finish. Yak Yak. replicant Dub_music is like-along echo delay,-looping through time. Regenerating every few- years, sometimes so quiet that only a disciple could hear, sometime shatteringly loud, dub unpicks music in the commercial sphere. Spreading out a song or.a groOve-over a vast landscape of peaks and deep trenches, extending- hooks and beam to vanishing point, dub creates llew maps of time, intangible sound sculptures, sacred Sites, balm and shock for mind, body and spirit. - -When you double, or dub, you replicate, reinvent, -make one of many versions. There is no such thing as an original niix, since inusic stored on multi-track tape, floppy or hard disk, is just a collection of bits. The composition has _been decOmposed,already, by the technology.- Dubbing, at its very best, -takes each bit and imbues it with new life; turning a 118 david toop raUonalorder of musical sequences into an ocean of sensa- tion. This musical revolution· stemmed originally fromJamaica - in particular, the tiny studio once run by the late Osbourne Ruddock, aka King Tubby, in Kingston. "This is the heart of . Kingston 11", Dave Henley wrote, describing the location of Tubby's studio for a reggae fanzine called Small Axe. "A maze of zinc fence, potholed roads and suitably dilapidated bunga- lows. After dark, the streets become ~ly deserted (by Kingston standards, anyWay, considering that loafing on the comer is a favourite Jamaican pastime), giving the impression - of an eerie tropical ghost town." Urban, rural, tropic, aquatic, lo-tech, mystical. This was the source mix from which William Gibson drew (sentimentally, some critiCs think) wben:adding the humanising element of Rastafariand dub to his Neuromancer narrative of tech-Gno- sis. When King Tubby ·first discovered dub, the revelation Came, ~ so many technological discoveries, through an accident. There ~re other Jamaican recording engineers, of course: Sylvan Morris; Errol T.. Thompson and Uoyd·"Prince Jammy" James helped to created the sound of albums such as Joe Gibbs's African Dub AU-Mighty series, or Augustus Pablo's King Tub~'S Meets Rockers Uptown and4fHca Must Be Free By 1983. But it was Tubby, cutting discs for Duke Reid at Treasure· Isle, who first c:Iiscovcred the thrill of stripping a_ vocal from its backing track and then manipulaUng the instrumental arrangement with techniques and effects: drop-out, extreme equalisation, long delay, short delay, space echo, reverb, flange, phase, noise gates, echo feedba~, shotgun snare drums, rubber bass, zipping highs, cavernous lows. The effects are thet;e for enhanceD;1ent, but for a dubmaster they can displace time, shift the beat, heighten a mood, suspend a moment~ No coincidc;nce that .the·nearestapproximatiQn to dub is the·sonar transmit pulses, reverberations and echoes of underwater echo ranging anfl bioacoustics. No coincidence.. also, that dub originated ina·poor section of a city on a Carib- bean island. 117 ocean of sound The first moment of dUb has been pursUed by reggae hist0- rian steve Barrow through numerous conversations with important reggae record producers such as Bunny Lee. InDUb Catcher -magazine, Lee conjures· some of the excitement of those btte-l960s, early-1970s' sessions when King Tubby be- gan to experiment With what he termed the "implements of sound": "Tubby's, righe, recalls Lee. "With all the bass and - drum ting now, dem ting just start by accident, a man sing off key, an' when you a reach a datyou dropou~ everyting an' leave the drum, an' lick in the bass, an' cause a confusion an' people like it ... Sometime me an' 'im talk an' me say, 'Drop out now, Tubby!' An' 'im get confuse an' me jus' draw down the whole a the lever ... you hear 'Pluck' an' jus' start play pure distortion.. Me say, 'Yes Tubbs, madness, the people dem like it!' an' just push it right back up ..~ An' then Lee Perry do fe 'im share a dub too, ca' 'im an' Tubby's do a whole heap a ting .•. 'im an' Niney [producer nine f1nger Niney 'the Ob- server'] an' musician jus' play, an' 'im jus' [makes discordant noises and-laughs]. '1m drunk, drunk yunno - the engineer a go stop'im an'[he] say, 'You no hear a vibes? Mad sound dat man.' An' when 'im ·come the people dem like it." Tubby worked with equipment that would be considered impossibly limited by today's standards, yet his dubs were massive, towering exercises in sound sculpting. Legend records that he cut four dubpIatc:s - special, one-off mJxes - for his Home Town-Hi-Fi S~em at the end of the 19605. Play- ingthese instrumental versionS at a _dance, with U Roy toasting verbal improvisations ove1' the m~ic in real time, he was forced to repeat them all night, dubbing them up live as the croWdwent crazy. Tubby worked for some ofJamaica's most creative producers: Lee Perry and Augustus Pablo, in particular, were recording increasingly exotic and distinctive music during the 1970s.0n atbums such as Perry's Super Ape and Pablo's Basta/the River Nile, the mixing board becomes a pictorial instrument, establisrung the illusion of a vast soundstage and then dropping instruments in and out as if 118 davidtoop they were characters ina drama~ Lee Perry was a master of this technique, applying it to all his records, whether vocal, dub,- instrumental version or talkover, -all of them rich 1n-his dub signature of rattling handdrumso_and scrapers, ghostly - __ voices, distant hom sections, unusual snare and ~-hattreat ments, groans and reptilian sibilations, odd perspectives and depth illUSions, sound effects, unexpected noises and echoes that 0 repeat to infinity. Dub also ,antidpated- remix culture.- In 1974 Rupie - Edwards, a producer of celebrated Jamaican artists such as I Roy, The Ethiopians and Gregory Isaacs, was the first to com- pile _a "version" album.,.. Yamaha Skank, twelve different versions of the rhythm of a song called "My Conversation". Although these Were not-dubs, they grew out of the idea of dubbing a track, shaping and reshaping its "implements of sound" as if music wasmodeUing clay rather than copyright property. Prince Far 1'8 vision , ... city of nine gates, magical OlOOn, circling clouds, marvel. of miracICs, twilight world, beauty unfold, in J.iving memory... _ _ _ Suns of Arqa,"City of Nine -Gates" world of echo o After the first wave"of dub albums during the 1970s from King ~by, Lee PerrY, Augustus Pablo, Yabby U, Keith Hudsoll:°andthe producer s~bles of Bunny~. Coxsone Dodd, Joe Gibbs and Niney, mariy of dub's innovations were applied to fresh contexts in America -and the UK~ New York dub emerged, almost as an ilieV1tabilitj-, from the disco tape editin3 and remixing of DJs such as Tom Moulton and Walter Gibbons. Moulton, -whose hectlc career as the pioneer oof disco iDJxing came to a halt atter ~ serioUs heart attack during a mix, restructured funk tracks with a razor blade, shaping ft>rthe ecstasi~ ~d libido reI~ of the dancefloor; a watter : .' ~ .

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