"What is about that little island that has produced so much brilliant music?" "Is it the "suffaration"?" "Is it the climate?" "Is it the weed?" "Dub music influenced all of those Americans rappers and all of them, all over the world!" "Jamaican music and its practices engendered the whole of the dance music." "Anyone who's got a bass line in their music that's dub." "Dub is responsible for the whole musical revolution that we have now." "Dub is the foundation." "I love it." "It's fantastic." "It's what music should be." "There's not a lot of thinking about it, it's just doing it." "You take a beat and you take some sounds and you echo them and put them through effects..." ""Dad!" "You know that song?" "It's new!"" "New to you!" "If you go back to the late 1940's sound systems already were prominent in Jamaica as a means of bringing the music to the people." "Although there was a thriving jazz scene in Jamaica, with live jazz music being played at least as early as the 1920s, most of these live events catered to the wealthy elite, so poor people couldn't afford the high price" "that these live concerts demanded." "And some of the concerts were also aimed at foreign visitors and tourists." "So the sound system sprung up." "Those guys could rule the whole of Jamaica." "There used to be a sound system named Tom the Great Sebastian, there was also Duke Reid's the Trojan and Sir Coxsone's Down Beat, with [Count] Machuki and Smith the Blues Blaster from the west," "Count Nick the Champ..." "You had a lot of sound systems." "Someone string up some sound system..." "Some... heavily powered amplifiers and speakers, give a low entry price at the gate, and just blast rhythm  blues all night." "Because sound system was something I loved the most..." "No matter what my grandmother said," "I would still reach dance anyway, you know." "I knew when I come home from dance" "I would get locked out," "I had to sleep outside, but there was no problem, because I already had my fun." "To me, that was my greatest fun, the sound system." "And still is my greatest fun, you know?" "Exclusivity has always been a major component of sound system culture in Jamaica, the way that a given sound system was able to retain loyalty in a very competitive field." "And, in Jamaica, a way of helping to preserve this would be to scratch off the labels so that no one could identify what the song was actually called, no rival sound could identify what song you had." "Coxsone and Duke Reid started to make their own music in Jamaica." "You get what I mean?" "When the rhythm and blues started to dry out these guys started to make their own music to play on the sound systems." "And that's how the record business started in Jamaica." "Sound systems were our radio stations!" "You understand?" "And when the sound system hit a tune, all the uptown people started buying it." "In 1968, a man called Ruddy Redwood, operator of a sound system called The Supreme Ruler of Sound," "SRS, went to Treasure Isle studio run off some material exclusively on acetates, known in the sound system culture as dubplates." "But the engineer forgot to put in the voice and was gonna stop it and Ruddy said, "make it run..."" ""...make it play like that."" ""I'll take that to the dance with me on Saturday night."" "And that's what he did." "So he played the vocal, which he already had, which everyone knew, and then he played this version, without vocal." "And he had to play it ten more... twenty times." "Tubbs and myself were there that evening." "When that music stopped playing, he put on the vocals fully, so when they went to Spanish Town and played it, it was a big hit with the crowd." "So I came back Monday morning and said:" ""Tubbs over the weekend, the little mistake they made at Duke's studio, tore up the place by Rudy's sound system!"" "He went back to Duke Reid and said:" ""You can put that on the other side of the record."" "And Duke Reid said:" ""wow, brilliant!"" "So basically now, you have a different breed of musicians who have come up, like Sly  Robbie," "Steelie  Cleevie and the Fire House Crew, who were basically bands." "They were riddim creators." "So they created crazy riddims and everybody wanted to use them in their projects." "Any studio that was putting out the best sound in dub, you got Studio One, King Tubby's and Channel one, a lot of people would flock to these studios because there was a sound coming from the studio itself." "So it made the studios become popular because people would go for that sound, because they had a sound that they liked, so they'd go for it." "So, King Tubby's, "Scratch" Lee Perry, Studio One, were the dub king pins of all studios." "As new producers came after Coxsone, they saw that Coxsone had some good riddims." "So why shouldn't they copy them?" "And maybe they'd have the same success." "I believe it was as simple as that." "So Coxsone became, in a way, "Coxsone Music"," ""Studio One Music", that was made by musicians at Studio One for Coxsone, became the backbone of Jamaican music." "Something like..." "an Alton Ellis' tune," ""I'm Still In Love With You"." "This tune was a hit in the 60s." "Alton Ellis;" ""I'm still in love with you..."" "Ok, good." "You say:" ""Ok, it was a hit in the 60s."" "Then it was a hit in the 70s." "Althea  Donna." "Did "Uptown Top Ranking", with the same rhythm track." "You think "Ok, it's been a hit twice in ten years, it will never gonna happen again." Oh yeah?" "Sean Paul comes and rides it in the 2000s!" "Right?" "So it's a hit again." "It was easy to do that because there was no copyright law in Jamaica related to recorded music." "But that was straight riddim, it wasn't drum and bass." "Drum and bass came in with Tubby's innovations." "You understand?" "Tubby started that." "He experimented with a version, and started to do tricks to the version." "Drop on certain instruments, bringing certain reverbs and things like that." "Until it gets like..." "And then started to add echo." "And this became exciting." "Thus, dub was born." "What they did was to take the mixing desk and made that into an instrument." "All of a sudden they pushed the bass and the drum upfront." "And they began to experiment sonically with very little equipment." "A lot of Lee Perry's dubs were made with two 4-tracks linked together." "That was the foundation of it, a brain and a heart." "I created a brain and a heart." "The bass is the brain, a brain for you to listen, and the drums are the heartbeat." "That gives you an idea of what the heart is saying in general." "So you put it through a bass drum and make it play." "So that kind of thing gives you an idea... that the bass drum is a living being." "A living being from the heart, that makes you want to dance." "Dub used to be the name of a plate, they called it a dubplate, that they would put the dub on." "So people just started branding names, like dubplate, dub." "So we would say dubwise." "So when you say dubwise it's like..." "back out the rhythm section and just leave the drum and bass alone." "Engineers, in general, just sit at the board do the electronic part of the music the audio section, like..." "You record a music, record the voices, every instrument, see that it's on the tracks properly..." "But a producer, no." "He's the man who tells the engineer what to do, tell the musicians what he wants them to play, and tell the vocalist how he wants him to sing the music." "And dub is also when the engineer becomes the artist." "Where the engineer uses his skills on the board to give a new life to maybe an old riddim." "In the studio you are making a dub, you experiment and you know people are going to like it because you feel the energy of it, and you experiment with it." "We don't use music sheets and all that." "It's just that people are feeling it, a man sings and a musician feels it, and... boom, an "A tune" comes." "We started off with these 2-track tapes." "2-track tapes, in the 60s." "Then we moved from them onto 4-track..." "Those are 4-tracks you see him holding." "Then we moved from those onto 16-tracks and 8-tracks." "16-tracks and 8-tracks." "Then we move onto 24-tracks." "16 and 24-tracks." "Then we moved on..." "Those are some mixed tapes, at a 2-track." "Some very valuable music, some irreplaceable music on that." "That was me when I was slim in 1967, 68." "This is Delroy Wilson's "Once Upon A Time"." "You might not know it, but I know it." "This is Errol Dunkley, this is Delroy Wilson again." "You've noticed that I've taped up plenty of them." "When I'm going to use them I pull them." "And we try to keep them in a cool condition." "Every object has a shadow." "You have to find your own shadow." "Every song could be dubbed." "You have to find the dub." "It's as simple as that." "Every sound system, everybody... in Jamaica... was crazy about the dub." "When Tubby's "Roots of dub" came out first, it sold like a 45 [rpm]." "The first dub albums came out in 1973." ""Blackboard jungle", "Aquarius dub"," ""Dub serial"..." "By the mid to late 70s most releases in Jamaica on 45 [rpm], had a dub B-side." "People would go to a shop, buy a single, and played the B-side first." "This was the period." "And this was the effect that dub had on people." "Some of these songs could last up to 15 minutes." "And, occasionally, you would have an A-side with the vocals followed by the dub, as one song, and when you flip it over, you get an extended dub of the same song." ""How is this done?", you know." "So people used to think like..." "Tubbs had... something on the sound that he would take out, the voice of the riddim, but it wasn't like that, he just had the riddim on the same dubplate." "People never understood it." "People started getting excited about the whole thing." ""Oh, Tubbs can take the vocals out of the riddim and leave the pure riddim"." "It was something different." "It was something great, you know." "Just great." "I wasn't there when it was born but I heard that King Tubby was the first who started dub music." "And I sort of believe that because he was the one who mastered it." "He was the best in dub music." "In his time." "Tubby was a wizard in electronics." "For example, he got from America a Fischer reverb unit, but it broke down." "So Tubby, who was a trained electronics engineer, fixed it." "But he didn't fix it in the Fischer way he fixed it in the King Tubby way." "At the time we didn't have the machines with these sounds." "We had to make them up." "We had to make our own delays, we had to run a tape delay then run it back." "He started to develop his sound system, separating the frequencies." "With steel horns playing the high frequencies." "and mixing tracks specially to be played on his sound system." "So the bass and drum would be heavy." "The most you could cut on a record." "And the treble would be sharp..." "Sharp like a knife." "And you'd hear that, on a steel horn, for 2 or 3 miles at nighttime." "So that would draw people." "Because these dances in Jamaica are in the open." "They're not in a hall." "They call it "dancehall", but there's no hall." "Just the sky." "King Tubby was the first who used a reverb on a sound, you know." "And an echo that..." "Like, when you said "King Tubby", you'd hear "tubby-tubby-tubby..."" "Really, dub evolved because of producers like Bunny Lee." "The vast amount of work he was funneling through King Tubby enabled King Tubby to experiment with all kinds of mixes." "There are other things he made with [Augustus] Pablo playing and him dubbing at the same time." "That is great too, I don't see no engineer doing this." "He was going straight to tape." "Live!" "The whole development of remix and the idea that you could take elements of a record and add something of your own to it, this comes from King Tubby, in a tiny studio, in the bathroom of a house." "Then he had a machine with a high pass filter on it and you'd get that..." "I used to call it the squaky." "Someone would be singing in a room smaller than this, much smaller, just like a square around me." "And a microphone." "And Tubby would then subject that vocal track to delay, to reverb, you know." "And people were singing up close to the mic." "So you had singers who don't really project their voices, but they became great studio singers." "That was great." "I learned a lot of things from him." "You know what I mean?" "It was the first studio that I really worked at, professionally." "So Tubby was gone too early, but he left a legacy of work and everybody followed him." "There is only one King Tubby," "I don't think we are going to have another one." "Tubbs is irreplaceable." "His contribution is really quite enormous, on many levels." "There are many different ways that he changed the direction of Jamaican popular music, from even the pre-ska days coming right up to the early 1980s, when he sort of went into exile and hasn't really been active in Jamaica since that time." "Perry is the producer who got the most out of certain artists, he got some incredible performances out of Max Romeo and out of Bob Marley." "Even before there was the sampler, you had people like Lee Perry doing sampling with splicing, and other techniques." "Yeah, he should be credited as far as opening a whole, you know, new approach to, you know, soundscaping music." "You can do anything with dub." "Anything." "You can do [?" "] like we used to have before." "You can even do rock music in dub as well, rock-dub, pop-dub, disco music-dub, everything can be dubbed." "It comes down to a normal stage and you start to recreate it again and take it to where you want to take it." "Everything." "Everything." ""Scratch" would just do some different things in the studio." "One time he would take a garbage can, put the microphone in the garbage pan and then, in the middle of the session he just go over and whacked the garbage pan!" "And get some kind of incredible sound out of that." "And keep it in the song." "And it would sound great!" "And he get's a mad sound and he doesn't care..." "He doesn't care if it doesn't sound all crystal clear." "He got his own... that much bouncing off the tracks," "you know." "His sound was like..." "You could see that the studio was filled with smoke, because that's what the end result sounded like." "I used to smoke a lot of cigarette, nicotine, ganja and drink lots of rum and didn't have the idea that it was destroying my brainchild." "So when I reached to the pinnacle and I realized that most of the dubs that I was creating in the Black Ark Studio was with alcohol, nicotine and rum," "I discovered I was wrong and I repented and burned down the Ark because it wasn't clean enough." "It was created by alcohol, nicotine and ganja smoking." "I was creating something that could destroy me and my fans as well, so I repented and started clean again, without any smoke, any meat, any ganja, any nicotine and started to create music to save me and my fans." "Clean, super clean music." "Crystal clean." "There's the famous "cow sound" that he had at the Black Ark... that a lot of people thought that he actually recorded some cows mooing but, apparently, Watty Burnett, from the Congos, explained," "he tried to record some cows that were in the fields nearby, and the cows would run away when he'd go and try to mic them up." "So, what Perry did was to take the cardboard roll that's like the inside of what you'd use in paper towels, covered in tin foil, gave it to Watty Burnett, who has a deep baritone voice, and made him go "moo!"." "If you try to live without water, you won't be living long, you would be smelling very stink, and very thirsty." "You can't get any water to cook, you cannot eat." "And you can't get any water to bathe, you can't take a bath." "You would be totally miserable." "So everything is coming through the water." "Water is my..." "I'm a fish in the original self, before I was a human being and I could not have survived without water." "So I learned from there that with water all things are possible." "I used to have water underneath my drum booth," "I made my drum booth on top of the water." "So, all the secret from the Black Ark was water." "Deep down, I guess we all have a crazy side." "But most of us would think it and dismiss it." "We do not act it." "I think "Scratch" is a genius because he acts out these thoughts." "If he thinks "this is what I should do", he's going to do it." "The dub revolution is..." "I created a revolution in the music, with dub, with the competition against dub" "and the people who were doing something else." "It wasn't for bloodshed or anything like that, it was just a revolution in music itself and I called it the dub revolution, and it worked." "There were all kinds of dark things going on, subversive things, going on in Jamaica at that time and that, of course, affected the nature of the music." "Many people were killed down there in the 1970s through the political civil war in Jamaica." "And King Tubby was on the border between two rival areas of political factions." "This music is political, even without applying lyrics to it." "The politics is already built into the structure of the music." "And it sounds, you know..." "It sounds like you wanna..." "When you play a heavy dub bass and this heavy riddim, it sounds like you wanna destroy Babylon." "These cultures, like dub and dancehall from so called "ghetto areas", proved to be very vibrant, very enduring, because they have to work hard to satisfy people in oppressed conditions." "They have to take them out of those conditions so they have to be strong to do that." "They have to lift people out of their surroundings and make them forget;" "like Bob Marley said:" "when the music hits, you feel no pain." "The DJ at the time was just a man who had a turntable, put on the music, read the invitations" "and tuned the sound." "That was the DJ's work at the time." "The whole advent of the DJs really starting to toast on records that really came to the fore about the same time as dub." "You know what I mean?" "With l-Roy, U-Roy, Big Youth, Tappa Zukie, people like that." "What Jamaicans refer to as "toasting"" "is basically what Americans and most of the rest of the world know as rap." "So this is where a rapper or what is tipically referred to in Jamaica as a DJ, will add lyrics on top of the riddim." "The best of the rappers at the time was a guy called U-Roy, who was deejaying for Tubby's Hometown Hi-Fi." "In the old days they used to say "hey now, dig for daddy and dig for mummy", you know, like Machuki and Lord Comic." "But when the dub came on, the DJ had the space to talk right over it." "When I started to play for King Tubby, like..." "On the first dance people loved it so much that everybody wanted me to play for them on the next dance." "Everybody who had a dance coming up, they wanted me to play for them." "U-Roy advanced the form from just being an incidental thing where someone would drop a proverb, or a wisecrack or a joke and made it a fluid form." "He'd toast continuously between the bits of the vocals that were left in, and mostly reinforced the message of the original song." "Many young DJs rose up from that, all over the world," "You know." "Which is good." "Dub created the opening for the DJ, and the DJ took over." "that they are totally separated but after you look into it, you'll find that..." "They are..." "You can't mention one without the other." "Now, you have this man, Kool Herc." "The DJ Kool Herc, who is one of the very most important figures in hip-hop culture." "But Kool Herc spent his youth in Jamaica, because he is a Jamaican, exposed to sound system culture, which is all around in Jamaica, and was all around him." "He took that idea of the DJ not just being the disc jockey, the person that plays the records, but the DJ as somebody who's gonna be playing the records and then vocalizing on top of the music" "to get the people excited." "What Kool Herc and his peers started to do allowed space, in the same way that in Jamaica, this dub music allowed the space for the DJs to rap on sound systems." "He was the first one to actually play breaks in all the jams." "Because if it wasn't for him, we wouldn't even really have the DJs." "Of course, you know, meaning that" "Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa were the first three DJs that really put hip-hop music into effect." "Kids with records and turntables, lots of Jamaican kids who lived in New York" "just started toasting, you know." "It seems like a normal progression." "Early sound systems didn't have the bands so they used to have just the versions for the toasters" "And for us, it's the same thing, you know?" "When hip-hop first started, the DJs were in the parks spinning the break beats with the MCs rapping over those instrumentals." "So it's the same thing, it's the same relation." "It goes beyond just..." "It goes beyond the sound, it has to do with the attitude, the mind-set behind it, the thinking behind it." "The basic process of creating a dub from a reggae instrumental is called "versioning", which involves taking little snippets of the original track, in other words, sampling the original track, and changing it into something new." "Affecting it." "And, clearly, hip-hop culture is based, more than any other music, is based, more than other music, on sampledelia." "And without that I don't think you'd have rap as it is, even though rap, hip-hop, as we call it today, is definitely an American innovation, but it kind of all started, in that level, in Jamaica," "with the toasters, the DJs." "It's a stupid question, but how many of you like reggae?" "You all like reggae?" "Dancehall, dub, all that type of shit?" "Dub music, as I said, dub music it's not so influential today in America." "But in Europe, it still has a lot of influence of dub music in Europe." "Even now I don't release any tune in Jamaica." "If people want it, they can get it from England." "England has become the main source, where we release all of these dubs." "You release the music where people appreciate it more." "England is the gateway to the continent, for if you hit big in England, you hit all over." "Jamaican music came to England along with the first wave of Jamaican immigrants that arrived in the 60s, you know." "Because, obviously, the music was the first real link of keeping in touch with what was going on back home." "In the early days, when I was a kid, most people migrated from Jamaica, they headed for England, they would take that boat for 20 days, packed their furniture, everything, and left Jamaica." "Now we travel with just a suitcase, these people used to go on the boat with their furniture from Jamaica, they took their records, everything." "If you depended on Jamaica you would die of hunger." "So you go abroad and just do what you have to do." "Dub music is not... a played music Jamaica." "You have to go to England" "France, parts of Europe to hear dub music." "Some of the artists who... with a song or tune from a particular producer, and that tune never even got released in Jamaica but that tune got released over here." "So that artist will be really a name over here but in Jamaica he's not really known for that particular tune." "In early 80s there was dub still coming out of Jamaica, mainly from people like Scientist and there was a guy called Peter Chemist as well, you know." "But most of the dubs were coming from England." "This can't die." "This can't die, man." "The message is too strong for it to die and we need it as well, so we decided to generate something for ourselves, and that was the birth of the UK roots scene." "We all lived in London and we developed, specially Shaka and myself, because we used to share the same premises, the same musicians." "People like Dennis Bovell, Aswad, Steel Pulse, that kept the reggae roots, rasta argument alive." "I think that Adrian [Sherwood] was the one who really pushed it the most, you know." "Rather than..." "His starting point, he learned his principles from Prince Far-I that was his apprenticeship and then he just pushed it." "We took ingredients from other types of music and probably made the stuff a bit more vicious and noisy." "And, literally, now it's evolved and you got..." "The evolution of dub's gone into... you know..." "You've got jungle, dubstep, all sorts of new things which, in m y mind, are keeping the flame alive, really." "Every now and then there's some interest in some crossover flavors, and some people with some dubby experiments come out and make hit records." "The Prodigy was dubby," "I mean, some of that Normak Cook stuff," "Beats International, was a bit dubby," "Massive Attack is a bit dubby." "You've got like the Notting Hill Carnival on the weekend." "That's officially like a Caribbean Festival, and there's, like, all that kind of music, and they make their own sound systems." "As small label, pushing dub is not an easy job." "I don't know if it's not as accessible as..." "Maybe it's because it hasn't got vocals in a lot of it, I don't know." "But it's not easy." "I'm known as the DJ that turned the punk onto reggae, as a DJ in a club called The Roxy, back in the late 70s, and this all happened really by accident, because what happened was:" "I got a gig to DJ in this punk rock club." "And it was so soon in the scene that there were no punk records to play." "So what was I going to do?" "I played something I liked," "I played reggae." "And we're talking about hardcore dub reggae." "And it turns out that the punks kind of liked it." "The reason that rock and reggae blend together is their heaviness." "If you listen to the rock guys, they pride themselves on being loud and heavy." "Right?" "Reggae has the same boast." "That we are heavy!" "They liked the anti-establishment vibe of the tunes." "And the fact that the lyrics were about something, they had a kind of music reportage quality." "It dealt with things like:" ""how are we going to live?"" "And it was themes like these that inspired the punk rock movement." "In 1977, when..." "Culture released hits like "Two Sevens Clash", at that time, the punk movement started to move," "Sex Pistols was on the up, The Clash was on the up, in fact, Lee "Scratch" Perry was working with The Clash," "Mikey Dread was working with The Clash." "Paul Simonon and Joe Strummer loved reggae very much." "And when it came time for them to record their music, what people do is to gravitate towards people you're inspired by, so they got a chance to make a record, they go on and check out Lee Perry." "because they want some of what Lee Perry's got." "Another guy that was really inspired by the whole reggae vibe and bass culture was John Lydon." "He used to be know as Johnny Rotten." "And you can hear the effect of the bass culture all over Public Image's material." "So, from that moment on reggae really kind of began to inform white culture." "He decided to go to Jamaica with Richard Branson, to start a reggae label called Frontline, on Virgin." "Richard Branson takes John to be his kind of musical advisor." "John rang me up and said:" ""Hey Don, do you wanna go to Jamaica?"" "He figured that as I'm black I must have been to Jamaica." "I've never been to Jamaica!" "The closest I've been to Jamaica was seeing "The Harder They Come" in the cinema, in Brixton." "But I said: "yo, I'm there!"" "And I got a plastic bag and the next day I'm in Jamaica with Johnny Rotten, for the first time." "And it was great, because..." "Because Richard Branson was signing reggae artists, the word got around on the island:" ""Rich white man signing up reggae artists!"" "Everybody, across the whole island, exodus!" "Everybody came to the hotel, except Bob Marley, Burning Spear, Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer." "Other than that, we'd sit by the pool and U-Roy, Big Youth, l-Roy, Tappa Zukie," "Congos, Ethiopians, Abyssinians, Gladiators... and on and on." "Everybody just came." "We were hanging out with those guys, it was a real trip." "What is about that little island that has produced so much brilliant music?" "Is it the "suffaration"?" "Is it the climate?" "Is it the weed?" "I don't know." "But it's so unique, you know." "We should all go to Jamaica once." "To pay homage." "Anyone who's got a bass line in their music that's dub." "You got that from dub, you didn't come up with it yourself." "And I noticed." "Most of these guys in England, who were trying to make dub, were trying to copy what we were doing." "But because technology started to make all of these gadgets to recreate that sound that we normally got from malfunctioning equipment, they started to use it to capture what we were doing." "But our thing was more like a natural thing, just happening." "They made all of these gadgets to try and get back the bass sound we used to have." "Now, for me, what interests me about dub are the principles of dub." "So, yeah, I listen to a lot of old stuff you know, a lot of... whoever:" "Lee Perry, King Tubby, Sly  Robbie." "But I don't necessarily try and recreate that, because we live 30 years on from that time." "To change hip-hop, to change soul, to change RB, dance music, to do all that, it's one of the biggest influences in the world." "We listen to all kinds of music, so it's all kinds of things that are affecting us." "So, as in the name, dub is the foundation." "It's a kind of framework underneath." "I don't think we..." "People who love dub would see 2ManyDJs and be like "they're great fans of dub!"" "But I do think there's an aesthetic." "in the way things are being manipulated, which I like." "So, in that kind of sense, it does have an influence, but it's not like we play Yellowman, Beenieman and whatever man..." " Yes, we do, we play Beenieman!" " Oh yes, we do." "Jamaica was an incredibly fertile place." "It was possible to go and make recordings with live musicians very cheaply, compared to the rest of the world." "That's why Paul Simon went there, The Rolling Stones went there, to record in good studios with a vibe." "In the case of "The Dub Side of the Moon" album, it has a certain natural, mellow flow to it that it didn't seem like that far off a jump to visualize a reggae version of it." "I really like the aesthetic in Jamaica of like... if they hear a big tune in the States or something they just go into the studio, take out the instrumental, put it out and start doing their own things over it," "press it up on a 7-inch, put it out on a shop the next day." "I love it, it's fantastic." "It's what music should be." "It's not a lot of thinking about it." "It's just doing it." "And it's the same, think..." "In a completely different way, we kind of do that too;" "if we like something, we manipulate it ourselves and then use it in our DJ sets." "The funny thing about updates, softwares and sharewares is that you have everybody having access to the same software, but the same thing happens with music." "Again, Jamaica is a very small island, people are all having access to the same records, everyone's going to "tailor" them to their own version." "I think that dub is more known to people that are making music than the general public." "It's because of the techniques that are being used and you discover that when you get into recording and start using echoes, and listening to records." "And people who are interested in production of music value that type of music a lot more." "The other thing in electronic music which, for me, is very interesting, in general," "is the repetition." "The constant, hypnotic thing like you have in the bass lines." "And all this just..." "It's hypnotic if you hear the same lick for three minutes, it takes you somewhere." "It's the whole sort of tribal thing that lifts you out of yourself." "There's a repetitive sense to it that is hypnotic, that takes you over." "For me, it was actually kind of early electronic music that got me interested in dub." "Like, you know, I'm not old enough to have been around when Lee "Scratch" Perry, and King Tubby started doing their thing." "But it was like loads of Massive Attack and Leftfield, and their kind of... take on dub influences in their electronic music that made me interested in dub and look back." "Prodigy took samples from "Out Of Space", and Prodigy has a massive influence in dance music." "And that was a Lee "Scratch" Perry produced tune they sampled it from." "The dub influence in dance music is a lot more than just heavy bass lines and little echoed guitar stabs and this kind of thing" "It's much more to do with their self-practices." "Versioning, remixing, and using effects, without which dance music wouldn't have happened at all." "In the early disco days, when you would have people like Larry Levan, doing mixes of vocal records they would kind of do a version that was more instrumental but would have a hint of the vocal in there," "which was then called the "dub version"." "Electronic music uses a lot of dub style delays on vocals, and snares and effects, which we are so used to now, but maybe if it hadn't been for dub, maybe they wouldn't be so sort of common-place." "The people who started to make dub abused the instruments, you know." "So you had a delay, you had a reverb, but it was meant to do something natural, you know?" "You'd put the reverb on just to make..." "To give a voice to space, you know." "In dub, you just push the reverb so it makes an explosion!" "Sometimes people go:" ""how do you get that sound?"" "But really, I mean, it's just an influence of dub music." "We're always looking back to older recordings and thinking:" ""man, how did that guy do that?" "And how can we do it." "on our machines", because we don't have the machines that he had." "So we don't even really understand everything that was going on back then and how they used reverbs," "analog reverb units, echoplexes and things like that." "So we're always trying to replicate those effects." "It's funny because people think that what we're doing is very new, but in a way it really isn't." "We're going back and listening to those records and trying to figure out how did they do it." "We're just trying to emulate certain things that they were trying to do, and we're still searching." "Trip-hop became a dirty word in this country." "Trip-hop was really trendy for a while with bands like Portishead," "Morcheeba, Tricky, you know?" "And then it was regarded as a bit of a fad, which had blown over." "But, actually, it just evolved into downtempo stuff." "And there's some great music." "I like the fact that people do follow the up in music, people like [Brian] Eno, people like The Aphex Twin, people like The Orb, and certain classical music;" "certain music that are just there;" "that you put on and you're not actually responding to it, like you would in a normal pop record or anything." "It's in the background, but it's kind of coloring the atmosphere that you're in." "Sometimes in music is tempting to kind of..." "When you want to go somewhere else, to put something else on top, and then put something else on top and keep building it up." "But with reggae and dub music, when they want something to change, they just take something out, and make you focus on this." "And that thing has been there all the time but you didn't appreciate it." "Bass and drum." "So a lot of dub music just gets stripped down to this." "I already have some effects printed, you can hear the reverb going off on that hit." "I've already put it right there, to save me time, so I can mess around with some other things while that's going on." "But... if you wanna actually hear..." "That's the sound of what's getting sent to the reverb." "So I can kind of control that, right?" "And with the cues I can mess around when the other reverbs come back." "I think, whenever I go into produce a band or make my own record, or even remix a record, I think" ""how do I get the essence of this record, or this feeling, over?"" "If I complicate it, then I don't get it." "But if I take this dub attitude, of making space, break things down, in four, five or six elements that work and put them together, then..." "I'm living in Kingston!" "The whole thing with the sound system is, essentially, where the club ethic come from." ""Let's get a bunch of records together that everyone likes and let's play them really loud."" "When I came to London I found that Jah Shaka was already doing sound systems for years and years, and I started going to Jah Shaka's sound systems and then... that was it, I was addicted." "And I've been going to sound systems ever since." "It's just a..." "Almost like a..." "It is quite an spiritual experience, I suppose." "It's a moment of..." "You're in a club, in a way, and you're listening to this big loud music..." "But it is a place of reflection, you know." "It's a place where you can almost meditate." "And you really get absorbed by the music." "Which with good house music you can as well." "I took my second or third acid trip to a Sly  Robbie dub album." "And I went into the shower and had to put the shower on, because I thought m y head was on fire." "Dub has a madness to it, has an insanity, which you can appreciate with or without drugs, alcohol or any stimulants." "It's got something in it..." "it goes completely over the top, and it takes you in a real sort of journey into this other world." "And that's what we love." "We love creating another world, like a dream world, in a way." "It was the time that I discovered the smoke and Lee "Scratch" Perry was just like, "wow!"." "I used to listen to stuff and all of a sudden there's a triangle in the back of the room, you know." "All those sounds were kind of flying around..." "It was the first time I really thought:" ""wow, there's something completely different going on."" "Whether it's modern dub music made in Europe or dub music made in the 70s in Jamaica." "It's the experimentation of music, it's the desire of taking a riddim track and play with it." "Take something out and make something new out of it." "It's like I love a tune, I think it's magic," "I can do something not to make it better, but to make it mine." "And that's what happens with dub." "That's what happens with DJs, that's a DJ mentality, and that's the dub mentality of" ""let's take something that's already been done and we can make it ours"." "I love that." "Reggae and dub came up with the idea of making the bass a melodic factor, making the bass the hook line." "It's the catch, it's what grabs people." "Whereas in western pop music, usually, that melody is played on guitars or keyboards or the vocals." "In reggae and dub it's the complete opposite." "They put the bass at the top." "If you go to a Jamaican dance, the bass is very important to the set." "You have those big 18-inch speakers." "While you go to a dance in Europe, in Germany, it's..." "In Jamaica you have to hold your heart, in Europe you have to hold your ears." "If you look at a frequency, the human ear will probably hear, will recognize sounds between 70Hz and 60 Hz." "But between 50 and 30Hz, it's a vibration." "It's something that..." "The wave forms are so slow that the ear isn't picking it up, but the body is." "And it's moving the body." "Renegade Soundwave, they, I think... did a track called "Women respond to bass"." "and it's absolutely true." "There's something very sexual about low, low bass." "That sort of affects you down here." "It's just a way you can feel it in your body." "It's something, like, for a party, for a crowd, they just dance to it." "Sometimes you won't even know what the bass line is doing, but it does something to the crowd, it's like soundwaves hitting people and affecting them." "I can remember sometimes at church listening to the live band that would play at church." "And when you were hungry, sometimes they could play a bass signal that would help you forget about the hunger!" "I'm telling you!" "I'm sure that one day they'll find out that they can use bass frequencies to heal people from pain." "The bass... makes you earn your ways." "The bass gives the music the taste." "The bass is all over the place." "If you can't play the bass... that's a big disgrace." "On the labels of the records in the 70s they used to put:" ""Drum 'n' bass" " King Tubby"." "Now, they just put "drum 'n' bass"." "And drum 'n' bass itself is a genre of music." "Yet, the first man to put his name to a drum 'n bass track was King Tubby." "There's a particular sound that comes out of Britain." "Drum 'n' bass happened in Britain, and it would never have happened in Jamaica but it took a lot of the influences it has grown up with, which was Jamaican music, and added something of its own to it." "I'd say that the dub that we're talking about is not necessarily easily relatable to what is drum 'n' bass now, in the sense of... it's much slower." "It has a slower beat." "Almost like a downtempo thing." "But, of course, when drum 'n' bass first started, they had very similar tempos." "Jungle is not new blood." "You can hear jungle in a Lee "Scratch" Perry tune." "You can hear jungle in Tubbys." "Scientist." "Original junglists." "I think that a lot of kids today, of like, let's say, 21, 22, who go out clubbing, would be surprised if I sat them down and say:" ""do you like this tune?"." "A soul tune or a reggae tune." "They would go: "nah, not for me..."" "Then you would play a drum 'n' bass tune which has got maybe a sample of that reggae or soul tune." "They would say: "I love this!" You know what I mean?" "We're coming up to now at a time that..." "The message of the man who's singing on the 70s..." "I can make this tune with a jungle beat and it will sound like a brand new tune, that was just made." "The message, what he said..." "And that's how important it is." "When all the junglists came to UK Garage, they speeded the beats up a little bit, the bass lines became a lot heavier and a lot darker the dread bass became a lot more prominent, and they brought with them the jungle MCs." "So, UK Garage speeded up US Garage and also brought the break beats in as well." "So, the 4x4 became the 2-step beat." "Yeah, we call our music dubstep because of two reasons really:" "one because it's a strip-down and minimum version of UK Garage and secondly because it's mostly instrumental so it's dub in the Jamaican dub sense, and dub in the instrumental sense." "Dub has an influence and it enters into..." "It has a style, which is Jamaican, but people from all over the world can take that style and make it theirs." "When I look for dub now, like heavy duty dub," "Jamaica is the last place to look." "There's no one in Jamaica actually making that kind of music, it's people from around the world that have picked up that vibe, and picked that ball up and ran with it." "So, I'm listening to people like Alpha  Omega, two white people from Cornwall." "I'm listening to a guy called MixMan, who's out of Birmingham, I think." "I'm checking out Basic Channel." "There's the Twilight Dub Circus." "You hear the song and think: "ok, that sounds like it comes from Jamaica."" "And it comes from bloody Sweden!" "In Italy too." "There's like the Ital Reggae bands, right?" "You have people in Greece making dub, you have people in France..." "Japanese groups." "Recently I went to Brazil and there's some Brazilian making dub." "I've done a dub version of a drum 'n' bass producer's album," "Marcelinho da Lua." "I listen to dub in order to clear the paths of my ears, the paths of my skull, got it?" "And I think it really cleans my ear, like a cotton swab, because sometimes it's very loud, other times is quiet..." "It alternates high and low frequencies." "There are also some vocals here and there..." "Actually, dub is not a style or a rhythm." "It's not a rhythm." "It is a way to see music." "Just like samba, like rock, like hip-hop, dub is everywhere you look." "You can find dub in electronic music, which is influenced by hip-hop, so there's no such thing." "The underground hip-hop uses a lot of electronic stuff." "In the future, no one will be able to say which is which." "The whole thing has transcended." "That's why it's so beautiful." "And this transcendency of dub in the future will be comprehended as this sociologist friend of mine once said:" "You'll be able to look at a painting and say:" ""This is fucking dub, man!"" "Or you will experience a certain feeling and say:" ""This is dub, man!"" "I don't think there's a need for dub to become necessarily on your radio at like, 8 o'clock in the morning on the Radio One." "I mean, there will always be tracks with that influence." "Capitalist society says only the new thing is any good." "The old things aren't good." "You have to have the latest model, the latest model car, the latest mobile phone, the latest clothes..." "So you continuously have to run to keep up with the latest." "But we're talking about a culture that made a riddim track in 1968 and I can cut it tomorrow and get a hit with it." "Yeah?" "Forty years, almost." "So, that's built to last." "Dub is there for those who want it." "I think it's doing quite well." "So, we're enjoying the same thing, we're not separate." "We're not the old people and the young people fighting and conflicting, we're all fucking humans." "You know, we're all together." "And that's really one of the reasons why I wanted to say" ""our old music, that you think is from mums and dads, is just as good as your new music."" "No difference." ""You think drum 'n' bass is heavy?"" "Here's some heavy drum 'n' bass... from King Tubby." "Just as heavy." "The dub echoes go as far as the machine lets you go." "That's as far as it goes." "Way, way into the future, future, future, future..." "Well, they never really stopped, did they?" "It's like when you drop a pebble into a pool of water and it just keeps going out." "Never really ends." "Well, as far as I see it, dub has no end." "There will always be the throne of dub." "No end." "And people are going to still discover dub." "In twenty years time, when drum 'n' bass is long gone, when hip-hop is long gone, maybe rock is long gone..." ""Long gone, long gone"?" "Where are we?" "China?" ""Long gone, long gone"!"