Label: M Records Format: CD,LP
When the Freq Meister asked me if I liked dub and fancied reviewing some I said yes. And after listening to this I’d still say yes again. What I like is that you can either let it all wash over you and be vaguely aware that space is being moved around while you stay where you are, or you can focus on the tiny modulations of one of the instruments. Like a magnifying glass held up to the sound a drum is making.
This is a good example of either approach and is the work of Ryan Moore who plays and produces everything. Tracks move effortlessly into each other with shifts in rhythm barely noticed. Ditto the instruments. Keyboards, bass and drums shift and echo, repeat and fade. I think the titles overstate the case in places : “Dub Blast” and “Seismic” are quite low level doses of dub. Likewise, “Dub Quake”. I didn’t find this a powerful selection of Dub no matter how I played it, just a sturdy bunch of ideas well produced.
What would have perhaps strengthened this CD is the addition of some horns, as in brass. Or some voices. Just something to add extra colour to the basic keyboard and drum foundation. I think a few brass contributions would vary the soundscape which, over 12 tracks, can become a little predictable. But that said, there is enough going on to make me think that I’ll still put it on sometime and let these weird dislocations of time and space happen all over again.
-Paul Donnelly-
Twilight Circus Dub Sound System – Volcanic Dub (A Second Opinion)
Returning from the recent trip to London, this music played over the speakers of a used Jaguar that eyed in the street in prerequisite paranoia and as the CCTV cameras played one-eyed hypnotist. Dub operated as a perfect soundtrack to the possibility and panic that lay down nearly every other street In The City. Hearing these songs brings back that time of curiosity and mystery and appalling echoing suspicion. The sodium lights of early evening, illuminating the collision of car into the double-decker bus in which I was riding; the person I met that started all of this inquiry and the autistic child and the violent yobfriend that could have come home at any time. Waiting for a train in the rain, in vain.
A sense of furtiveness and death lingering in the air in the form of the mad cow disease, and how that thing lies dormant and comes back after years, an echo in time from a time when feeding the gorgeous baby colt seemed like a good idea. Zow zow zow zow zow. The endless pulse of the underground and the choob rats that scurried through England’s faded dream. Thank Christ there are no soul-singin’ divas herein – well, wait, I hadn’t met any of those in England, so it follows. It further reminds me of Europe because in Norway someone said what I had done was to invent “street dub”. And two-second delay pedals are becoming increasingly difficult to find.
-David Cotner-
