Dub, a largely instrumental reggae variant whose characteristic, echo-soaked bass and drums would filter through into hip hop, post-punk, and dance music, turns 45 this year. The Ancienne Belgique is celebrating this birthday with “Dub Be Good to Me”, a series of concerts and lectures that try and capture the magic of the genre. Matthew E. White is the first to unveil his love for dub.
Legend has it that, exactly 45 years ago, the Jamaican sound technician and producer Osbourne Ruddock, better known as King Tubby, “accidentally” invented dub, when he forgot to include vocals in a mix that he was making of a rocksteady song by Slim Smith. The truth is more complicated: in Jamaica it was normal for the B-side of a single to contain instrumental “versions”. In the late 1960s, Tubby was working as a technician for the producer Duke Reid and used to make versions of 45s. He soon discovered that not only could he remove the vocals, but also modify the sound, emphasising certain instruments and adding effects. “A lot of things are happy accidents,” says Matthew E. White, who is a big fan of Tubby. “Maybe hundreds of people had done it before him, but he was the first to realise its magic.”
White is a US singer-songwriter and producer, who founded Spacebomb Records in Richmond, Virginia and attracted attention this year with the wonderful, heart-rending Big Inner, on which he fused his love of Dr. John, Randy Newman, and Jorge Ben Jor to create an intoxicating mix of gospel-soul, country jazz, and tropicalia. There are no obvious dub influences in this rich, bittersweet hybrid, but White never tires of pointing to the influence of reggae and dub as sources of inspiration. White: “To me dub is more than a genre, it’s an exciting way of working that can influence the way a label works, and change the recording industry or how albums are recorded in general. It goes beyond reggae or Jamaica.” The man is so enthusiastic about the subject that he is going to give a talk on it in Huis 23 in the context of “Dub Be Good to Me”.
Matthew E. White lets his light shine on dub
What makes dub so interesting?
Matthew E. White: One of the most unique things about the Jamaican music industry is that there’s no separation between being creative and being commercial. Essentially dub is the remonetisation of a track that has already been recorded, in as many ways as possible. Over here, record labels, especially small ones, shy away from that, but in Jamaica they didn’t. That created a whole other mindset of making music. In a crude way you could compare what dub artists like King Tubby did to today’s remixes – like Hot Chip just did with my song “Big Love”.
Apart from the financial, opportunistic point of view, there’s the creative aspect of dub. Dub is highly experimental with the music. Dub producers leave out the vocals, put the drums and bass forward, add reverb to it. The essential thing in that is that they highlight parts of the song that were previously not highlighted. Usually you put down a mix that goes on the record, and that is your statement. Dub makes the process from A to B a lot more flexible for the artist, and more transparent for the listener. You take in the music in a totally different way. Dub teaches you to listen.
You put a cut-out of King Tubby on the sleeve of Big Inner, next to that of Dr. John. Why do you put them on a pedestal?
White: To acknowledge different music traditions that have been very important to me, but weren’t particularly obvious on the record. When you listen to Big Inner, you can’t put your finger on it and say, “It’s there and there”. It’s not a zydeco or a reggae record. But both music from New Orleans and from Jamaica have been very important to me. The image of King Tubby is of course a homage, because he was a real pioneer, he broke some serious boundaries in the way music can be recorded, but he also represents Jamaican musical culture as a whole. It’s that bigger tradition that is really important to me.
King Tubby started out as a radio and television repair man. Is that the basis of his technical wizardry?
White: Yeah, he had chops. By day, he worked in a hotel, where he wired the electrical system and built transformers. In the studio he was constantly rewiring his boards and making transistors by hand. He had a real thorough knowledge of the sort of man and machine combination that dub is.
I don’t know too much about his life, though. He didn’t give a lot of interviews; he was a lot less vocal than someone like Lee Perry. He was very religious, he didn’t drink, he didn’t smoke weed, he didn’t allow people to smoke pot in the studio. Which is like the antithesis of how you think that a lot of that music is made. [Laughs] He was also a huge jazz aficionado. People sometimes forget that a huge part of dub is improvisation, like in jazz music. That’s a big difference with “remixes”: improvisation immediately goes out the window.
You said you wanted to make a dub version of Big Inner. Is that what the planned re-release of the record is going to give us?
White: No, the original songs of Big Inner remain the same. But there’s a five-song EP included, called Outer Face, from which I’ve just released a track, “Hot, Hot, Hot”. It was a sonic experiment to keep the music very minimal, like in dub music. There are only four sounds on the EP: bass, percussion, strings, and vocals. As an artist you want to keep it interesting and do something different every time. You capture a moment in time.
Matthew E. White: One of the most unique things about the Jamaican music industry is that there’s no separation between being creative and being commercial. Essentially dub is the remonetisation of a track that has already been recorded, in as many ways as possible. Over here, record labels, especially small ones, shy away from that, but in Jamaica they didn’t. That created a whole other mindset of making music. In a crude way you could compare what dub artists like King Tubby did to today’s remixes – like Hot Chip just did with my song “Big Love”.
Apart from the financial, opportunistic point of view, there’s the creative aspect of dub. Dub is highly experimental with the music. Dub producers leave out the vocals, put the drums and bass forward, add reverb to it. The essential thing in that is that they highlight parts of the song that were previously not highlighted. Usually you put down a mix that goes on the record, and that is your statement. Dub makes the process from A to B a lot more flexible for the artist, and more transparent for the listener. You take in the music in a totally different way. Dub teaches you to listen.
You put a cut-out of King Tubby on the sleeve of Big Inner, next to that of Dr. John. Why do you put them on a pedestal?
White: To acknowledge different music traditions that have been very important to me, but weren’t particularly obvious on the record. When you listen to Big Inner, you can’t put your finger on it and say, “It’s there and there”. It’s not a zydeco or a reggae record. But both music from New Orleans and from Jamaica have been very important to me. The image of King Tubby is of course a homage, because he was a real pioneer, he broke some serious boundaries in the way music can be recorded, but he also represents Jamaican musical culture as a whole. It’s that bigger tradition that is really important to me.
King Tubby started out as a radio and television repair man. Is that the basis of his technical wizardry?
White: Yeah, he had chops. By day, he worked in a hotel, where he wired the electrical system and built transformers. In the studio he was constantly rewiring his boards and making transistors by hand. He had a real thorough knowledge of the sort of man and machine combination that dub is.
I don’t know too much about his life, though. He didn’t give a lot of interviews; he was a lot less vocal than someone like Lee Perry. He was very religious, he didn’t drink, he didn’t smoke weed, he didn’t allow people to smoke pot in the studio. Which is like the antithesis of how you think that a lot of that music is made. [Laughs] He was also a huge jazz aficionado. People sometimes forget that a huge part of dub is improvisation, like in jazz music. That’s a big difference with “remixes”: improvisation immediately goes out the window.
You said you wanted to make a dub version of Big Inner. Is that what the planned re-release of the record is going to give us?
White: No, the original songs of Big Inner remain the same. But there’s a five-song EP included, called Outer Face, from which I’ve just released a track, “Hot, Hot, Hot”. It was a sonic experiment to keep the music very minimal, like in dub music. There are only four sounds on the EP: bass, percussion, strings, and vocals. As an artist you want to keep it interesting and do something different every time. You capture a moment in time.
Just like dub does time and again.
White: Yeah. Dub is a good metaphor for the way I look at art in general. You always want to stop at an interesting place. You want to make something that stands alone, for sure. But at the same time it’s healthy to look at something as always changing, that’s never finished. Dub is the ultimate example of that in the recorded music world. There’s even not one version of dub, there’s version one, but then there are also versions two and three.
Dub Be Good to Me: Matthew E. White on dub • 14/9, 16.00, gratis/gratuit/free, HUIS 23, Steenstraat 23 rue des Pierres, Brussel/Bruxelles, 02-548.24.24, www.abconcerts.be
White: Yeah. Dub is a good metaphor for the way I look at art in general. You always want to stop at an interesting place. You want to make something that stands alone, for sure. But at the same time it’s healthy to look at something as always changing, that’s never finished. Dub is the ultimate example of that in the recorded music world. There’s even not one version of dub, there’s version one, but then there are also versions two and three.
Dub Be Good to Me: Matthew E. White on dub • 14/9, 16.00, gratis/gratuit/free, HUIS 23, Steenstraat 23 rue des Pierres, Brussel/Bruxelles, 02-548.24.24, www.abconcerts.be
Read more about: Muziek
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