Label: Universal Egg Format: CD
Zion Train affiliates The Tassilli Players have always offered up intriguing themed Dub CDs, from their debut Great Sporting Moments in Dub via their guide to Outer Space to the interactively-designed Wonderful World Of Weed In Dub (this latter wasn’t a CD-ROM in that interactive sense – each track was designed with different varieties of weed in mind for the listener to consume in association with the album, should they desire). Now An Atlas Of World Dub pays tribute to and makes a journey through the globalised dub diaspora, starting in the UK and spreading tentacularly to New Zealand via hitherto unsuspected havens of the bass vibration such as Russia, Finland and Poland.
Naturally there are stops off in the weed capital of Europe, Amsterdam – in fact, this is can be a very difficult dcity to summon the energy to rise up and depart for a quick tour of other contnental hotspots. The travels are smooth, riding on a gentle sussurus of echo, swimming in languid bass, floating on hovering keyboard trills, stepping to the rimshots and keeping the feet beating to the slow interrupt of percussion. Deep down in the background are the sounds of the cities and countrysides where the walls and trees reverberate to the low end. Stangely, Jamaica is not one of the stop-offs, but perhaps there have been enough guided tours of the studios and yard sounclashes of Dub’s homeland to make a contribution on this CD superflous. There is plenty of bass outside Kingston, after all.
At journey’s end, the new promised land of Wales, Llanidloes, home to the Zion Train collective after their flight from the dubious delights of riverside South Tottenham. Here the effected shimmer of joy at a welcome back to bass makes a celebratory instrumental chant to the green valleys, watching the jet aircraft fly away over the hilltops (thankfully not the RAF practising their sheep-bombing skills for northern Iraq as is their frequent and noisy wont at treetop height over Wales in this case). There’s nothing like travel to broaden the mind and ears, and globalisation has its occasional pleasures after all – but there’s no place like dub for a home.
-Linus Tossio-
