Lee Scratch Perry - Studio Black Ark 16:9 by blondinreims
How Dub inspires my performative acts:
Almost every reggae record had a dub version on it. The first strictly Dub album is considered to be Black Ark’s “Blackboard Jungle”, produced and directed by Lee Scratch Perry with the aid of his in-house band “The Upsetters”. This album, engineered also by the King, was consisting in 14 dub reggae singles: revolutionary and effective, these became history in no time.
Few years later thank to figures of the Jamaican Reggae industry, like Scratch, Dub Reggae became famous worldwide and started to influence many artistic figures around the world, including mine.
A lot of the things happening inside Perry’s studio Black Ark fascinates me. The first thing is uniqueness of the Scratch’s sound: like a Da Vinci, nobody will be able to reproduce the exact soundscape of Perry’s Dub. The character of that sound connects me to Kingston’s unbearable heat (due both to the weather and the constant amount of street violence) and its wetness reminds me the humidity of a December early-afternoon in Montego Bay.
Even though Perry’s artistic style has a non-fully-comprehendible workflow of creativity, it certainly inspires me quite much.
I think that dub techniques really fit with my workflow and partly shape it.
Main Dub technique that I’m using in mine and Ray Poon’s performance is live delay manipulation. I love this techniques because it gives me the illusion of controlling time, something that I always dreamt of when child.
Also dub mixing will be a fundamental part of our performance: working live with send, returns, feed-backing signals, and EQs to give a ever-moving soundscape.
Dub is organic, aims for a constant (but wise) recycle of your samples. Dub is my act of rebellion against a wasteful music industry that always follows this never-ending line of satisfying a customer more than a listener, and definitely giving more freedom of movement to who’s investing in it rather than who’s collaborating creatively at the core of it. Without creatives, crafting techniques would not be bent into something suggesting.
It is also important to mention the ethereal trio of the interaction between dub music, ambient music, and noise music. If Ambient music owns much of his texture to Dub, we can syllogistically affirm that Noise, following the path of Ambient, owns also a lot to Dub.
Taking inspiration from the three, me and Ray gave birth to No Contact, a dub-ambient-noise performance with jazzy influences.
“I love to sing love songs. But I have got a war on my hands and I have got to win it. ...” (Lee Scratch Perry)
