More Bokeh Versions goodness for you here. I love the story told on this page, of how the artist sent the label almost 500 tunes and said ‘pick some.’ If only choosing album running orders was so easy!
Reference points for me here are like a mashup of Muslimgauze, Saint Abdullah and Hamza El Din being brought together in righteous dub-groove harmony.
Lee “Scratch” Perry is responsible for at least three of my very favourite ever pieces of music.
One of the best things about getting older – and you’d be surprised how many best things there are about getting older, given the bad press it gets amongst da yoof – is that you can have as many favourite ever songs as you damn well want. Anyone trying to get me to narrow it down to some arbitrary number would just get told to naff off, though maybe less politely, followed by a diatribe about place, mood, environment, memory, etc. You can have as many favourite songs ever as you want, you know.
On this album that I wasn’t expecting, the great man is teamed with On-U-Sound, the great Adrian Sherwood. Now, other favourite songs ever have issued forward from this stable and its denizens., meaning that you could be forgiven for expecting great things from this, pre-loading an expectation on the thing before you’ve even given it a listen.
Fortunately, their shoulders are broad enough. There is much substance here, and with enough listens, I may even have some additions to me favourite ever songs.
I looked for you
And I found me
What a disappointment that was
I had to try again to become lost
So I looked for me
And I found you
From the perspective of a man hanging from a tree, by any limb, if necessary: the world goes by withall wherewithout, changing only according to the colour and the contour of the eye. A concave statement, when applied to a complex bio-lens instrument, shall be interred by deferment, a symbol of which is your lassitude. I wish you well, the tree is my protector, the tree is my anchor, the tree is my mantra and will put me up, for sale. When all I feel is falling, all is what I’ll be.
A minimalist in all but execution
I took my clothes off
Oh!
You meet so many people
Measures of forever are surprisingly impermanent
Welcome to my reality – don’t expect concessions
I made myself a rock
then I made myself a hard place
then I surprised myself
by what I used them for
Implications for the continued placement of the cart before the horse include:
1 – the horse came into existence because the cart was already there!
2 – the horse doesn’t exist! The cart is all there is!
3 – The horse is just a figment of your imagination, which is imaginary anyway!
4 – The horse cannot exist without a cart!
There are smoking guns amongst the smoke and mirrors
Take that opinion off its pedestal!
When you’ve got nothing to say, where do you start?
Todays fire analogy is to do with evidence and hypothesis.
Say a new perspective or idea arrives in your head, howsoever it may get there. This idea can be supported by experience, it may be questioned by experience, or experience may have no relevance to this perspective (the latter condition is highly improbable although theoretically possible).
Think of the hypothesis as a fire. Supporting evidence is fuel for that fire. This is nice and simple.
What, then, about evidence that seems to contradict the hypothesis? Should it be used to attempt to douse the fire, or would it be more properly used if it were instead considered fuel for an alternate hypothesis/fire? After all, an incorrect hypothesis should not need putting out – it will starve for lack of fuel.
Now, I have seen and you have seen people try to feed their fires with something called ‘selective evidence.’ This may cause you to fear that incorrect fires will be burning because the fuel has been hijacked from the correct fire.
I put it to you that if the fuel is not appropriate to the fire, the fire will not gain much from it, and that there is a law of diminishing returns in these scenarios.
My current hypothesis is that if a fire has been burning for a long time, the chances are that the fire has a steady supply of appropriate fuel.
The only way to keep an incorrect fire burning beyond its natural life would be to use an INORDINATE amount of inappropriate fuel. The strange thing is that true fires seem to keep burning in the background. This may seem confusing. No one said perception and discernment would be easy.
It’s been too long since I put some dub on here (sheesh, nearly a year) 😮
So I’ve got the week off work, which means my kiddies are staying with me, which means I have to be more within the real world than when they’re not staying with me. Their preferred methods of entertainment are, sadly, youtube gamer related, but when they turn these things off and play with actual toys, I choose to fill the interludes with educational sound seeds. Hopefully they’ll seep in to their unconcscious minds and spring forth in later life.
Dub is one such seed. Your mileage may vary, and my children’s certainly does, but a groove is a groove, and these are some fine grooves. Like all dub, there is a high emphasis on consciousness – you’ll find it in the spaces. And like all dub, there isn’t a lot of description that I can give that wouldn’t be better experienced by actually listening to the thing.
I mentioned in passing the idea of doing a dub mix post, which is a silly idea.
Most truth started life as an outrageous claim. The outrageous claim for this tune is that it is the first ever dub 45. Maybe it is?
Which Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry song to choose?
Fuck it, I’ll cheat and give him a sort of second appearance:
Those of you who have the compilation mindset (if you have, you know what that means; if you don’t know what that means, you haven’t) will have your own versions of this – a song that may not necessarily ever reach an all time top-50 if forced to name one at gun-point, but nevertheless is always in contention for your next mixtape. This one was one of those for about 10 years for me, from the compilation album that did so much to get me into dub, Crooklyn Dub Consortium vol II:
Another one from the Certified Dope vol II album. This samples a King Tubby tune called Dub Fever:
I do believe I may have mentioned this song before:
I could go on for ages, but my PC is old and laggy and I’m really killing it now. I’ll therefore finish with a bit of French electroclash, from the 2005 compilation French Dub system 2.0:
Fuck it, here’s one more… the rather good Alpha & Omega:
I likes me some dub. Because I don’t know why, I haven’t listened to much over the last few years. I used to listen to it really quite often. Many of my favourite ever tracks come under this banner. (hmmmmm considers dub mixpost)
Dub Foundation are a 10 piece live dub band based in Wisconsin. They make some really groovy dub tunes that are quite feel-good in their style even if they are singing about the crises of youth. Music like this is the reason that descriptors such as ‘crucial,’ ‘irie,’ and ‘righteous’ started getting applied to music, or at least, that is my understanding of music history. And also they remind me ever so slightly of ex-punker Burning Babylon.
the bandcamp is here: https://dubfoundation.bandcamp.com/album/march-forth
the album is on youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHLzak7J068
Soundbergs 