SCIENTIST: Scientist Meets the Roots Radics

During my first listen to this record, I was mesmerized by a moment deep in the A-side when Scientist strips away everything but Errol "Flabba" Holt's bass guitar and Lincoln "Style" Scott's snare drum. Flabba's bass is predictably MASSIVE, but I was transfixed by that snare drum; single shots, laid back, on the twos and fours.

Tock... Tock... Tock... Tock...

I hear so many snare drums. So do you. And the range is tremendous, from hypertight JB funk snaps to the moldy thud of low-maintenance garage drums. The ten-gallon freighters of the FM 1980s. The factory-floor press of steely electro. There are clops and cracks and whomps.

Style Scott supplies sonorous, supple snares; scientist strips sonics. This brief sound, foregrounded by subtraction, is beautiful. It's a collaboration between Styles (holding stick) and Scientist (tweaking knobs). EQ and slapback echo are applied with the artful precision of a seasoning chef.

And here's me, listening intently to single smacks of drumstick on a snare drum, a sonic event that happens every second or so in most pieces of rock, soul, hip-hop or metal. The sound of a snare drum (more a category of sounds, maybe, some of which aren't actually generated by an actual drum at all but by an electronic machine) might be the sound I have heard more often than any other sound in my lifetime. Most of the time, it's barely noticed, like the hum of my refrigerator or the windy, distant rush of traffic. I hear those snares without actually hearing them. And here's me listening to that sound like someone just invented it.

This is what I love about dub. This music has the patience and restraint to let us savor musical elements we usually take for granted. The sizzle of a hi-hat. The crack of a snare. A metronomic bassline. The single staccato scratch of a rhythm guitar. Reminded of the joy in these, we can take that joy with us, back to other listening experiences.

I like that the mixer and the band are given equal billing on this LP. Dub is a collaboration (no matter how after-the-fact). You may have heard the Roots Radics backing up Barrington Levy or Eek-a-Mouse. The notes on the back of the sleeve (I'm looking at the 2012 reissue) suggest that the Radics supplanted Sly and the Revolutionaries in a kind of torch-passing (marijuana reference not intended) from the age of Roots to the age of Dancehall. (Why aren't they called the Dancehall Radics?) Scientist, as you know, won the world cup and rid the world of the curse of the evil vampires. His most famous work (Vampires) is also a dub of Roots Radics riddims. This LP plays things a little safer than that one, but both are brimming with pleasures.

DJ/RUPTURE & MATT SHADETEK: Solar Life Raft

Based on a sci-fi concept laid out in the short narrative in the liner notes, Solar Life Raft is set adrift in vast floods over the post-civilization East-coast. Scavengers discover sounds, the last remnants of dead cities now up to their penthouses in melted polar ice. Survival and loss haunt every moment, and so does hope.

The mix was put together by turntable theorist DJ/rupture and his Dutty Artz co-founder Matt Shadetek. Starting with an imagined setting and then selecting music to score it sounds like a recipe for contrivance, but /rupture and Shadetek select songs that suit the narrative abstractly. You won’t hear them spinning Peter Gabriel’s “Here Comes the Flood” or anything like that. Like any good musical project, this leaves room for your imagination.

Listening to music is better than watching movies. Movies (with a few rare exceptions) constantly tell me exactly how to feel about everything, employing a million trite manipulations (the most egregious of which is, ironically, the musical score) to force everything into a tight interpretive box. Some music does this too, and that music is boring to hear and boring to write about. Solar Life Raft is exactly the cure for that tedium.

There is a certain wobbly, sea-sick quality to Dubstep that fits in with however you imagine this particular post-apocalypse: Tempos are slow and swaying, with deep foghorn synthbass, sounds reverberate across the endless waterscape and the sampled or dubbed vocals (like the snippethook in Babylon System’s “Get On Up” and the mournful singing in Pulshar’s “Mr. Money Man” respectively) sound preserved or submerged, echoes and ghosts of prophets whose warnings went ignored. When Nico Muhly’s Lanskyesque piece “Mothertongue: Pt. 1” makes an appearance, cutoff and resonance knob-twiddling is creatively employed to simulate what it sounds like when you bob up and down in water, your ears submerging and emerging, sounds muffled and then clear again.

This mix was made the old-fashioned way: in real time, on actual turntables. It’s seamless and technically perfect, other than the occasional moment where two records in incompatible keys are layered, (although that clang of dissonance may be by design, or a happy accident accepted for the extra ear-tension.) The peaks and valleys are sequenced perfectly, like a tightly structured film. The most emotional moments come at just the right time, and the ratio of blissed-out mood beats to sing-along moments is perfect. When it ends, I feel like I've had a complete experience, adrift in the dubby floods.

SCIENTIST: Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires

It’s a dub record, so you know what it sounds like: The chunky wobble of the bass, the rusty scrape of the high-hat, the bass drum’s muddy thud, the horn section playing in a cave, the vamping guitar drenched in cement-floor slapback and the disembodied voices adrift in their delay-unit haze.

Scientist, once a protégé to dub innovator King Tubby, isn’t reinventing the dub wheel here, but he’s a master of his craft. His intuition is perfect, and the addition-by-subtraction process yields a work that never becomes repetitive or dull. There is a bright, crisp sound here, as opposed to the deep murk of, say, Lee Perry’s excellent Super Ape. Little spoken bits at the start of many of the songs (“I am the living dead!”) lend a kind of thematic unity, but it doesn’t really extend beyond those brief catchphrases and the album cover. Scientist’s albums all have amazing titles, by the way, like Scientist Meets the Space Invaders and Scientist Wins the World Cup. It’s like he’s going on all these great adventures, when really he’s just mixing some awesome dub. (He also made an album in 1980 called Introducing Scientist: The Best Dub Album in the World. I like it when artists aim high.)

Like strophic techno, dub is constructed by the addition and subtraction of layers. Each of the repeating elements is congruent with the others, and the music moves through a series of combinations as layers are added and removed, reintroduced or silenced as necessitated by the track’s momentum. Unlike techno, however, these elements are not programmed into a machine, they are parts played by session musicians, recorded to a multi-track tape where they can be isolated from each other in the mixing process. The musicians are typically not the stars of the show, however. It is the man at the mixing boards whose name (or pseudonym) graces the cover.

A few years ago there was a dustup when several tracks from this album were used in one of the Grand Theft Auto games without Scientist’s knowledge or consent. Scientist was apparently upset that his music was associated with anti-social wish fulfillment (“I don't understand why they have someone who steals a car and shoots up the place, then he's listening to reggae and Rastafari on the radio.”) The fact that he received no compensation probably stung a little as well. Just because the cover boasts his name doesn’t necessarily mean he is recognized as the author of this work, however. A managing director at Greensleeves Records said "Basically, Scientist was claiming to own copyrights in songs and recordings as a result of being the mixing engineer. Although we always felt these claims were ridiculous, we had to defend ourselves all the way to trial.” Greensleeves won in court, perhaps because certain people in the legal system just don’t understand how dub works. Apparently, according to precedent, the mixing engineer can not claim authorship of a recording.

So who is the author here? Henry “Junjo” Lawes produced the recordings and wrote the arrangements, which are played expertly by the Roots Radics Band. The original mixes feature vocals by Michael Prophet, Wailing Souls and others, though in Scientist’s mix, these are reduced to well-placed snippets.

Jamaican pop uses and re-uses riddims frequently, and the artistry most often recognized is what a certain performer does with those pre-recorded backing tracks. It’s not unusual for the same Sly and Robbie track to be used for several different songs by several different vocalists. This is similar to the way American rappers will recycle each others’ beats on mixtapes, except in the case of reggae and dancehall the practice is often a feature of “official” releases.

In the early days of dub, a single’s b-side would often be a dub version of the a-side. Somewhere along the way, dub became an art in itself, and whole albums of dub versions were released. I haven’t heard the original un-dubbed versions of any of the tracks on Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires, though I suspect I would like them quite a bit. It’s strange that those originals have fallen into obscurity while these versions comprise a recognized classic. Who's the author now?