10 dub albums that changed my world (Pt. 2)

Plus DjRUM, Josi Devil, Gazella and more

Graffiti at the Barcelona zoo. I think it is mean to be Father Christmas. Artist unknown,

Welcome to part two of my list of 10 dub (or dub-adjacent) albums that changed my world, in some way. You can read part one, here.

In part two, things get perhaps even weirder, as dub creeps into the modern world.

6) Creation Rebel - Starship Africa (1980)

While Kamizaki Dub and Crytuff Dub Encounter Chapter 1 are graceful exercises in the typical dub tropes, Starship Africa, the fourth album from UK dub band Creation Rebel, is a radical remodelling of the genre.

The music was originally recorded by Creation Rebel and Adrian Sherwood in 1978, intended as the basis of the debut album by DJ Superstar. That never happened and Sherwood returned to the tapes in 1980 when he was looking for a record to launch his new label, 4D Rhythms, which he had set up with singer, songwriter, composer, artist and producer Chris Garland.

Garland takes up the story on his The Psychedelic Manifesto site. (Capitals very much his own.) “I had come up with the concept of Starship Africa and had discussed it with Adrian a number of times, he was, I recall very enthusiastic. I outlined the ideas which was basically to create a form of ‘PSYCHEDELIC DUB REGGAE’.

“I was a huge fan of people like KRAFTWERK, CAN, LA DÜSSELDORF, NEU and TANGERINE DREAM, all ‘THE GERMAN ELECTRONIC BASED MUSIC’! and people like STEVE REICH, PHILLIP GLASS and TERRY RILEY whose ‘RAINBOW IN CURVED AIR’ was and still is a work of pure minimal genius, so I felt we could somehow fuse together all this with the Jamaican Dub Factor, with Adrian’s mastery of the mix, as the empowering factor.”

Sherwood explained that he had a Creation Rebel tape in the archive that would be perfect for this. “So we booked time in Berry Street, dusted down the tape and (again if my memory serves me well) dropped a tab of acid each,” Garland writes. “We literally turned the multi track inside out, upside down, in fact everything that you could do with studio technology at the time, we did it, so the finished recording had no trace or connection with what it once was. Adrian’s often repeated story in interviews etc, is that I spent the whole session, shouting ‘More, more, more effects, it’s got to be wilder!’”

(On the Creation Rebel Bandcamp the story is a little more restrained. “Remixing and re-recording the rhythms saw Jamaican drummer Style Scott recruited to play live over [Creation Rebel drummer] Charlie Eskimo Fox's original tapes (played backwards through the desk!); an additional half a dozen percussionists, drawn from whoever happened to be in the studio at the time, were also overdubbed,” Both can, I suppose, be true.)

Whatever the case, the resulting album is a remarkable work and a psychedelic jewel of a record. Imagine dub if it was powered by LSD rather than weed and you have Starship Africa, all backwards suck, percussive dubs and the most utterly comforting bass lines.

7) Scientist - Scientist Wins the World Cup (1982)

Scientist was another producer to emerge from the King Tubby school of dub, coming to prominence in the early 1980s with a series of themed albums that took dub into subtly modern new directions. There was considerable joy as a dub-curious teenager to enter the local record shop and find albums like Scientist Meets the Space Invaders, Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires and Scientist Encounters Pac-Man, with their ridiculous names and overblown cartoon covers, which I think contributed to my enduring love for Scientist.

All of these albums are fantastic. But the one I would pick out - perhaps because it was the one we listened to most - is 1982’s Scientist Wins The World Cup, subsequently reissued as Junjo Presents: Wins the World Cup, in recognition of the role of producer Henry “Junjo” Lawes in the record. The LP’s irresistible cover features a reggae-inspired Jamaican football team beating England 6-1, while the sleeve promises “Ten Dangerous Matches played by The Roots Radics Squad with Referee Junjo…. Mixed at King Tubby's by Scientist”.

So it’s a concept album… But, of course, it’s not really. In fact, …Wins the World Cup follows the dub tradition pretty much to a letter: Junjo produced and arranged a series of songs that stalwart reggae band Roots Radics recorded at the Channel One studios; Scientist then tampered with these to his heart’s desire at King Tubby’s. (In fact a battle over who exactly should get the credit for this album is behind the name change on reissue.)

The songs are themselves immaculate and Roots Radics play with the exacting heart and soul of perfect studio musicians. But perhaps the most fascinating thing about …Wins the World Cup is its position as a bridge between the roots reggae of the 1970s and the digital dancehall that would follow. Junjo’s production is still recognisably based in classic reggae but it sounds cleaner and brighter than many of the 1970s recordings, as studio technology has moved on into the 1980s.

Scientist, meanwhile, teases many of the more modern elements out of these songs, like the weird, digital wobbling sound on Dangerous Match Three (a dub version of Hugh Mandell’s Jacqueline) or the metallic bass flex on Dangerous Match One (a dub of Johnny Osbourne’s Love Is Universal), which sounds like the kind of eerie melodic lead Isolée would come up with more than a decade later.

8) Basic Channel - BCD (1995)

And so we reach Basic Channel, the German duo who invented dub techno in 1993, with the release of their own Enforcement 12 inch (under the nom de plume Cyrus), the first record on their Basic Channel label. What the duo - Moritz von Oswald and Mark Ernestus - did feels so incredibly obvious that it is amazing that no one did it before. (That, of course, is the mark of a really good idea.) Rather than trying to recreate the dub sound using electronic instruments, they instead borrowed the genre’s obsession with minimalism and studio effects, applying these to heavy techno loops in a combination that worked perfectly. Some of the duo’s early tracks - Enforcement and Phylyps Trak, for example, both from 1993 - don’t even have bass lines to speak of, which would be sacrilege in the world of King Tubby.

Having earned the title of dub pioneers, von Oswald and Ernestus would later (well, in 1994) produce a number of tracks - the classic Quadrant Dub I and II and my personal favourite, Phylyps Trak II/II - that sailed slightly closer to what we might know as dub, centred around wandering bass lines, dubbed out effects and clipped machine rhythms, with millennia-wide space in the mix for the duo to play around in.

These songs - like classic King Tubby productions - are simultaneously lazer-focused and relaxed, ever-changing and repetitive, and totally hypnotic in their stroll. Phylyps Trak II/II is so unimpeachably perfect - I genuinely don’t think it can be improved in any way - that for me it basically negates the whole existence of dub techno producers in the modern world. (Harsh, maybe…)

The duo would go even closer to classic dub production under the Rhythm & Sound moniker (both artist name and label), when they invited singers like Paul St. Hilaire and Cornell Campbell in to add vocals to their electronic dub excursions. Fantastic as this music is - and definitely check out the Rhythm & Sound compilations The Versions and With the Artists - it is the Basic Channel recordings that are the most radically new and I would encourage you to listen to them all, although many of the classics are handily compiled on the BCD and BCD 2 albums.

9) Massive Attack versus Mad Professor - No Protection (1995)

I’ve heard it said that No Protection, Mad Professor’s album-length dub remix of Massive Attack’s second LP Protection, is the best-selling dub album of all time. Whether this is true or not, I don’t know. But No Protection was an absolute staple of student living rooms back in the 1990s, when I was at university.

It is perhaps for this reason that No Protection feels like an album that can be easily dismissed, a dub caprice from a best-selling group that shifted hundreds of thousands of copies to people who wouldn’t know a Scientist record if it came and played table football against them. But this view is totally wrong and highly unfair. One the one hand, Massive Attack have deep roots in reggae and were heavily influenced by reggae and dub, notably working with legendary Jamaican singer Horace Andy on both Blue Lines and Protection (and on subsequent albums too).

On the other, the producer who took control of No Protection, Mad Professor, is one of the most important names in the British dub scene, his presence lending considerable weight to the project. (To briefly resume: Mad Professor came to London from Guyana at the age of 13 and rapidly fell into the musical world, setting up his own recording studio and label - both called Ariwa - in the late 1970s. He has worked with everyone from Lee “Scratch” Perry to Grace Jones and continues to produce brilliant music to this day.)

The most important argument, however is that Protection is simply a wonderful album, which expands the horizons of (the ever so slightly too tame) Protection in all kinds of fascinating directions, while staying true to the original songs. It’s a good introduction to dub, too, as it surely was for thousands of people, with the genre’s key sounds and techniques on show in a very elegant way, while Massive Attack’s expensive sounding production lends itself to dub dismantling. Bumper Ball Dub, the dub of Karmacoma, is the height of the album, echoing keyboard stabs and reverb-laden percussion rising out of a monumentally heavy bass line like Godzilla advancing on shore.

Mad Professor also remixed Massive Attack’s third album, Mezzanine, in its entirety, although the Mezzanine Remix Tapes was only released in in 2019 as part of a wider 20th anniversary album re-release. It is utterly fantastic and you can read about it here.

10) Pole - 1 (1998)

I said earlier that Basic Channel simultaneously invented and mastered dub techno when they released their first 12 inch back in 1993. And while I stand by that, the genre wasn’t quite done because Germany’s Stefan Betke - aka Pole - still had to have his say.

Pole’s unique sound came about by accident: one day the producer dropped his Waldorf 4-Pole filter and found the resulting clicking, hissing, popping sound it emitted so interesting that he built his first three albums around it, the imaginatively named 1, 2 and 3.

It doesn’t sound like a promising start. But what Betke did with his broken filter was amazing, creating music that seemed to be made from the very shadows of dub: the pop of the vinyl, the surface hiss of recording and somewhere, far away in the mix, a song playing, often represented by the trace of a bass line and the faintest hint of a melody. It sounded like liquid nitrogen dub, dub with all the warmth sucked out and the faintest trail of lingering after-effects.

On his Bandcamp, Betke explains the process behind the three albums thus: “A common factor in all the releases was that they all originated in a kind of dub continuum. Melodies have never been my motivation - they were always more peripheral. But across those albums, the reverbs and the bass lines were always related and interlinked with each other. By working that way, I didn't feel as if I was under any artificial pressure and I could allow things to end loosely in order to continue my work.”

1, 2 and 3 are very much of a kind. Over the course of the three albums the pops and hisses fade slightly into the background as the more musical elements creep slowly into the limelight. But you wouldn’t exactly call it a radical development. 1, then, is the most purely Pole of the records, which is why I have recommended it here, a reminder that dub still had more to give some four decades after its invention in Jamaica.

Peter Perrett - an apology

Dear reader. I like to think I try to keep you up to date on some of the best new music, be it electronic or otherwise. In the case of Peter Perrett’s The Cleansing, however, I have failed you, failed myself and failed Peter Perrett. The album came out in November. I am only recommending it to you in March. It is a SPLENDID album, funny and sad and wise and melancholic and upbeat and contemplative and so much more. Go and listen to it now. (Also, watch this space for my interview with Peter, which I recorded last week in Barcelona.)

Some listening

DjRUM - Three Foxes Chasing Each Other

I probably shouldn’t say too much at this early stage but DjRUM’s forthcoming album, Under Tangled Silence, is an utter jewel of a record. It follows the success of DjRUM’s December 2024 EP Meaning’s Edge and it is vaguely in line with that record’s finely spun web, albeit recorded in a more analogue manner, with real live instruments. Three Foxes Chasing Each Other - and pat yourself on the back for that title, DjRUM - is typical(ish) of the album’s approach, joining a frantic mbira (I think) riff, to drums that beautifully combine organic thump with electronic assault, to the point where the listener is uncertain where the line has been crossed and if, indeed, there was even a line in the first place.

Demise of Love - Strange Little Consequence

Strange Little Consequence is the first fruit of an intriguing relationship between Daniel Avery, James Greenwood (Ghost Culture) and Working Men’s Club, where acidic shuffle meets a giant rock chorus and gets on just fabulously. The rock / electronic crossover has been very well established - but there is still something that makes you jump in surprise when the chorus of this song comes leaping out of the speakers like a 19th Century Highwayman.

Josi Devil - Make It Better

People seem to be getting very excited indeed about the new single from Bristol producer Josi Devil, which makes merry game about condensing a metallic breakbeat smasher and a bleep bass line shuffler into one steel-blood juicing package, as if Devil couldn’t decide which of his filthy ideas was going to cause more havoc on the dance floor and the only option was to drop both simultaneously. Well why not? The record’s other side, Restless Sleep, is slightly less unruly but you still wouldn’t take it home to meet your parents, however elite its sound design.

Annie and the Caldwells - Wrong (You Dropped a Bomb) (Nicky Siano remix)

Nicky Siano was a resident DJ at Studio 54, for God’s sake, and this is his first remix in more than a decade. Fairly obviously I went to Studio 54 about one time less than Grace Jones’ horse (i.e. no times) and I imagine the same is true of your, dear reader. But I can certainly imagine this rollocking, rolling, writing piano-led soul / disco banger tearing it up under the cocaine spoon moon, with is a compliment to Siano and also very much to Annie & The Caldwells, a family band headed by Annie of the Staples Jr. Singers. This tune will make your day.

Gazella - Volver

For a while now, (fellow Radio Primavera Sound host) Johann and I have been banging on about leafgaze: the kind of dreamy, guitar-y music you might listen to while lying under a tree, looking at the sunlight gently dapple through the leaves. And - by God - I think Valencia’s Gazella have cracked it! Volver is an undulating, melancholy, diaphanous work of horizontal brilliance, like how M83 would have sounded if they weren’t rubbish, the kind of song that makes me regret my decision to never agin use the word “gossamer”.

Liquid - Time To Get Up (Liquid House mix)

“Liquid” is a word I frequently use to describe things I enjoy in music, so the “Liquid House” mix of an artist called “Liquid” has to be quite something. This isn’t just any old musician called “Liquid” either: Eamon Downes is best known for the massive rave hit Sweet Harmony and was also, apparently, the first signing that Richard Russell made to XL Records back in 1992 (although XL had been running for years by this point.) Anyway, XL has now made Liquid’s XL catalogue available on streaming, which is a fantastic excuse to revisit the Liquid House mix of Time To Get Up, a bubbling and incredibly innocent rave tune that sounds like The Exorcist soundtrack with all the malice removed, as the sun comes up on a beautiful summer’s day.

Things I’ve done

RPS Presents - Porridge Radio (The Farewell tour)

This week on the Radio Primavera Sound Twitch, we spoke to the ever fascinating Dana Margolin, of Porridge Radio, about the band’s farewell tour, why nothing really ends, poetry, art and writing songs that she wouldn’t write. Dana is one of my favourite interviewees ever and I really recommend you have a listen

The playlists

Some people make their playlists only available to paid subscribers. So, in a sense, if you follow mine you are actually earning money. And who could say ‘no’ to free cash? Hooray, then, for my best new music of 2025 playlist. And three cheers for my very, very long playlist of the best music from the last five years.