1988, CSA
Dub House Of Horrors
(!) Dub
Grossly Overweight Dub
Fatal Dub
Dub Express
Dread-Ging The River
And On The Seventh Day... Dub
Eastern Bloc
Australian reggae records predating this one are extremely few and far between, and as far as I am aware, Australian dub records predating this one don’t exist. I’m not super familiar with the scene but it was in its infancy and one of the last things you would expect to come out during that time is a left-field and forward thinking fully digital dub LP. That this record exists at all is interesting, that it has such a distinct character is remarkable, and that it is so skillfully and confidently executed is just nuts.
In my eyes, in the late 80s the torch of the latest dancehall style was being carried forward by producers like King Tubby (in the last years of his life) and Jack Scorpio, and the ‘hottest new sound’ can be heard on records of theirs like King Tubbys Presents Soundclash Dubplate Style Part 2, Ninga Mi Ninga Showcase (by Courtney Melody) and King Of The Dancehall (by Yellowman). Others like Dennis Star and Redman were doing similar things. In terms of leftfield dubbing there was Mad Professor doing his Dub Me Crazy series the whole way through the 80’s, and while those are the closest thing to Ten Dubs, the style is really only ‘comparable’ and not ‘similar’. Nothing else at the time sounded like Ten Dubs and its sound is still unique and fresh. In this way it doesn’t even feel ‘dated’ as an 88 record like how the ones mentioned above do.
Thematically the music sounds the way the cover art and track titles look – moody, horrifying, oppressively dubby, and not colorful. If you were to take decontextualised piano licks like individual notes, tremolos, or running your finger up and down all the keys, and then wobble the pitch shift knob, you would get a sound that would work wonderfully in a horror track, and that is how Dub House Of Horrors opens the record. In the absence of lyrics, dub track titles often bear little connection to the music they represent, but you would be hard-pressed to find a dub tune that fits this title better than this one. While Sheriff Lindo’s dub is built on a traditional foundation of delay, skank and reverb, the real hallmark of the style is the moody palette of sounds in the drum and bass, the glistening pads and other sounds that make up the ‘horror’ atmosphere, and the incessant use of detailed effects and variations on loops. By Jamaican standards it’s very overproduced (but then again so is everything foreign) but it sidesteps the common mistake of adding pointless sounds just to fill space. The space is almost completely full, but it’s full of drum fills that go way out of pocket, machinegun delay, and tasteful chords that ring on forever in the treble range. There are more than few who go on about craving the hardest and darkest dub out there and this is exactly the record to find it in. Shame there's actually only eight dubs and not ten.
Half the reason I wanted to write about this record was so I could gush about the bassline from Grossly Overweight Dub, which goes like this:
This is the first (but not last) time I have whipped out the music theory wankery on Bim Kill Him so I want to go slow enough to break down why this bassline is so mind-meltingly brilliant. Basically the melting of the mind occurs in the second half – until then it feels like any old comfortably original and delightfully moody bassline that you would expect to find on this record, but then when we return from the low notes to the higher notes, we are led to believe one thing is coming, but something else comes, and it feels so horribly wrong because we feel as though the notes have deceived us, when in reality they were doing the right thing all along.
So how does he do it? For starters, we are in G# minor which is one of the most fucked keys, which is why there are so many F double-sharps written on the score. That is the ‘leading 7th’ in the melodic minor scale – the pitch is equivalent to G natural, but if we wrote G natural every time then it would be a nightmare to distinguish the G natural from the G sharp. Hence the F double-sharp. The bassline in the first three bars has nothing conspicuous going on, then in the fourth we descend to E – not too unusual – and since we’re hitting that leading 7th we could think of it as E minor. Not many peoples’ first choice but still within reason. Then we go back and forth between that and D minor, at which point you start to feel like the notes within those chords are like a new musical comfort zone, which is odd because D is a tritone from G#, and in Western harmonic rules we expect that to be the most difficult place to inconspicuously make your way to. Yet by the time you get there, I doubt the average listener will have noticed that anything is unusual, and so it becomes a comfort zone, which you get very rudely yanked out of when the bassline moves back up to the G# in the last two bars. Anyone who grew up listening to Western music of any kind will naturally expect a resolution from D minor to A minor here, and the bassline to rise up to the A to follow suit, but it just doesn’t quite make it there, and lands squarely on the most fucked-up sounding G# you ever heard.
Maybe you are thinking “But Mr. Bim Kill Him, it DOES resolve to A minor, look at the chords!” and you would be completely right that it does, because whenever the bass is in G# minor in this sequence, the skanks are hitting A minor, which is bonkers, but the distance is so great that it just passes as ‘detuned’ when you first hear it. We might write that down as Am/G#, and ‘at face value’ it will sound like this:
So in conclusion, Mr. Lindo managed to not only create an arrangement where the above chord doesn’t ring alarm bells in your ears, but also to go to the tritone and back without you noticing, until finally you are shown what it is like to experience a resolution to Am/G#. It is like enjoying your day, believing that you can see just fine, and every now and then having a blindfold ripped off you that you didn’t know was there – only once it comes off do you realise you weren’t able to see anything before. You get a gut-wrenching feeling as you wonder – if you weren’t even aware that you were blind, how can you trust any of your senses anymore? Rinse and repeat every eight bars.
Bim count: 0
My picks: Dub House Of Horrors, (!) Dub, Grossly Overweight Dub, And On The Seventh Day… Dub, Eastern Bloc
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