Twelve dub records, in order
A route through dub itself rather than through reggae: twelve albums in sequence, from the first tentative experiments to the point where the method left Jamaica altogether.
Mad Professor
Producer and engineer
- Guyana, then London
- 1979 onwards
Neil Fraser built his first mixer as a teenager and founded Ariwa in south London at the end of the 1970s, making it one of the longest running black owned studios in Britain.
The Dub Me Crazy series ran to a dozen volumes and defined a specifically British strand of dub: cleaner and more electronic than the Kingston records, still enormous at the bottom. He has also produced a long line of singers, which is the part of the catalogue people overlook.
Outside the scene he is best known for No Protection, his 1995 reworking of Massive Attack’s Protection, which is a genuinely great dub record and a rare case of the remix outliving the argument about it.
Go and listen
These are searches, not verified pages. Names in this music are reused often, so check you have the right Mad Professor before you buy anything.
On Natty Dub
Ariwa, and building a studio out of nothing
British dub did not wait for the industry's permission. It built its own rooms, in south London and elsewhere, and made records the industry did not understand for another twenty years.