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.
There is already a list on this site of records to start with, and it is a roots list: songs first, dub as the thing underneath. This is the other route. Twelve dub albums in the order they were made, which is also roughly the order in which the form worked out what it was.
Taken in sequence they tell a story that no single record does. The early ones are experiments that do not quite know they are a genre. The middle ones are completely assured. The last few are made by people who never set foot in Kingston.
Working it out
Lee Perry and the Upsetters, Blackboard Jungle Dub. Cut in 1973, and about as early as an album length dub gets. It is rough, the mixes are inconsistent, and that is most of the pleasure: you can hear people deciding what this is while they do it.
Keith Hudson, Pick a Dub. The following year, and the first record that feels composed rather than assembled. Sequenced, sustained, and much stranger than its reputation.
Augustus Pablo, King Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptown. The canonical one, and it earns it. Patient to the point of discomfort, with the melodica sounding like the loneliest instrument ever made.
Fully formed
Joe Gibbs and the Professionals, African Dub Chapter 3. Errol Thompson at the desk, dropping in telephones and sirens with comic timing. It should be a novelty. It is not, because the placement is perfect.
Yabby You, Beware Dub. Austere, slow and religious in a way that is genuinely unsettling. The rhythms leave enormous holes and the mixing walks straight into them.
Scientist, Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires. Quicker and funnier than anything before it, over Roots Radics rhythms that refuse to hurry. The best argument that dub can be playful without being slight.
Prince Jammy, Kamikazi Dub. Jammy’s analogue period, before the digital turn he went on to cause. Heavy, precise and slightly cold.
Leaving
Mikey Dread, African Anthem. A radio engineer’s record: collage, station furniture and effects treated as composition. It sounds like nothing else here.
Mad Professor, Dub Me Crazy!!. South London, 1982, on equipment he largely built himself. Cleaner and more electronic than the Kingston records, and the start of a British strand that is still going.
African Head Charge, My Life in a Hole in the Ground. Adrian Sherwood and Bonjo Iyabinghi Noah, making a place rather than a song. Dub as method, applied to something that is not reggae at all.
Dub Syndicate, Tunes from the Missing Channel. Style Scott’s drumming out of the Roots Radics, put through Sherwood’s hands until the room stops being real.
Rhythm and Sound, With the Artists. Berlin, decades later, by two people who arrived at dub through techno and then went looking for the source. Slow, enormous and almost static, with Jamaican singers over the top.
Play them in this order over a week rather than an afternoon. The distance between the first and the last is the whole argument: a way of working that started as a cost saving measure in Kingston and ended up as one of the few genuinely new ideas in recorded music.
The sequence is adapted from a listening route in a reference guide held with this site’s notes.
