Tha Don Of Dub

Augustus Pablo - East Of The River Nile

Ok, ok, ok. So this is more than appropriate for my first reggae post. It's a little late in terms of Jamaican music history (1977), but this is one of those cases (A la Disclose to D-Beat) where a genre and a scene takes a few decades to produce a single definitive work by a single definitive artist. What you have here is the quintessential dub record. The only vocal on the entire album is a small "Shoop Shoop Shoop Shadoobie" kind of thing that goes for 4 bars on "Unfinished Melody". You get a bunch of laid back, hypnotic one drop grooves mixed in with a few crushing dubs.

This is one of my favorite records to try and sample
- The sparseness of most of the arrangements makes it seem like a no-brainer, but then you dig, and you dig some more, and before you know it you've listened to the whole damn record without sampling a note. Hypnotic is the word. This is one of the first dub albums I ever got heavy into -A friend of mine who worked at borders at the time (2002 or so?) pulled it from their promo bin, brought it home and didn't like it. Well Lindsey, yr loss. I've been on this shizz ever since then.

Looking at the Wikipedia entry for this album revealed some things I didn't know - King Tubby produced all of this except for one track, which was produced by Lee Perry. Most of the Wailers played on this album too.

As an aside, when Perry burned down his studio he was working on an album for Pablo - Scratch claimed that the master tapes of the album were possessed by the devil, or some crazy Perry type shit. I can almost believe it - If you listen to the level of work put into this album (you have to actually LISTEN for it though - This is dub, not hip hop... The work is designed not to be heard - the mutes, drops and accents are mostly supposed to rest and hide in the mix rather than jump out of it - Hardly an easy task in the 70's when all these guys had to work with were acoustic intsruments, reel to reel multitrack machines and homemade FX) it's deep.

So anyway, go ahead, keep sleeping on this one. You've probably been sleeping since before you were born, so I'm sure you won't know the difference. For the heads out there, on the other hand... Stop being an embarrassment and get familiar.