dub music from the roots reggae period (circa '70s) is probably what i listen to most, when i'm puttering about the house, tooling down the empty rural roads etc. my writing on it is represented in an essay in how to escape and a (somewhat overlapping) chapter of political aesthetics. i'm interested in it because of its transformative effect on pop music all over the world, for its complete re-thinking of the ontology of music or the idea of the song (there would be no hip hop without it, e.g.). i am interested in it from various political angles. but i listen to it all the time because it just makes me feel chill, and you can let it be background or suddenly focus on all the coolness and badass bass lines. if i were enumerating a handful of favorite artists in the history of music, augustus pablo would be among them.
one great extension of the tubby/scientist/jammy-type nexus has been the work of the british producer adrian sherwood (my late brother adam's big hero), such as the dub syndicate things. on itunes i sort of stumbled on what i'm thinking of as the next iteration: don goliath's 'rootstep' series. (don goliath might be a skinny white kid from berlin, which is quite as it should be. once you release something like dub reggae into the world, there's no telling where it might go or what it might do.)
maybe this is how producers issue stuff now, but it strikes me as pretty bizarre: 'rootstep to the world' appears in 30 album-length collections - each almost exactly an hour long - indistinguishable from the outside except by numbers. and that is only one of a number of such series don goliath has issued. within each volume, you get four songs (if that's the right term) in four versions each: a vocal (often, or some other maybe single approach, a 'feature'), a 'melodica cut', a 'dub' and a 'riddim'. it's almost like a straight mathematization of the whole way of re-thinking the pop song invented by tubby, or it turns the way yabby you or glen brown recorded into a logical notation. but the important thing is that few have understood what makes a reggae riddim line crucially evil as clearly: the melodies are so fundamental and dangerous. also he's constantly paying tribute to various moments in the history of reggae. he has really learned how to build a classic roots riff.
i guess the 'step' part indicates in part the mechanical beat, and it does tend to get incessant. in its way, though, it is a club dance music, and at least in many contexts that does suggest that you build and build on the straight beat. (adam sartwell was a club dj in dc, and sherwood's electronic stuff did work in that context.) i also do think don goliath overuses a basic whip-crack or pistol-shot effect. one source of that is the great black uhuru/sly-and-robbie cut 'what is life?' even with the completely digital environment, though, the music is not soulless.
but there is an issue. one way to see it would be on 'night and day' (x4) on volume 28 (no i haven't downloaded all 30). it's a version of the great and under-known 'melt away' by max romeo (i think lee perry at the mantrols?). killer riff, but the original plays with the rhythm: there's a little delay or lilt that makes it insanely perfect. well you can't put that into a lockstep, quite, and it gets squared up. still i am not unpleased with don goliath's version either.
{it's always nice to find something good on youtube with 5 hits: plausibly, a discovery!)
that is one of the fairly-rare direct extended quotes in the rootstep series i think.
he may be conceiving the whip-crack as the genre ('rootstep') itself. and it's not that there are no variations, drop-outs, and so on. though it may appear that don goliath is issuing way too much stuff way too fast, the material is consistently excellent. and the beat just becomes your body.
