Dub Revolution. Jamaica's Sonic Innovators and the Birth of Remix Culture

The most abstract, playful and confounding of reggae subgenres, dub is a vital component of sound system culture that has wielded disproportionate influence. Emerging as an underground phenomenon in Kingston during the early 1970s, dub was wrought by sonic alchemists such as King Tubby, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, Prince Jammy and Scientist, conjuring musical mutations at the mixing desk. Dub reached other lands through the Jamaican diaspora and as Lloyd ‘Bullwackie’ Barnes furthered the form in New York, Dennis Bovell, Mad Professor and Adrian Sherwood conjured their own dub masterworks in London, Jah Shaka and his acolytes subsequently helping dub to achieve global reach. Widely adopted by post-punk producers and later a crucial influence on the underground dance music scenes of several continents, dub indelibly changed the techniques and aesthetics of music production with far-reaching effects; it’s no exaggeration to say that without dub, there would be no hip-hop or house music.

Dub is made from studio trickery, its auteurs fashioning something new by subtraction rather than addition, reversing standard recording techniques. It is a music of absence and deception, a ghostly sonic doppelganger with bass primacy and torpedoed song structures, full of holes and unexpected twists. The evolution of dub marks the birth of the remix and the emergence of the studio as an instrument in itself, a place where songs can be pulled apart and given wild reshaping, rendering a disembodied new form that is often cosmic and typically jagged. Dub’s progression is also inseparable from the troubled history of post-colonial Jamaica, blighted by caustic Cold War interventions, attendant gang culture and communal breakdowns. Through first-hand testimony with dub’s most noteworthy creatives, David Katz’s monumental forensic history of an astounding subgenre that sounds like the future five decades after its inception stands as the authoritative book on a musical art form that continues to fascinate, generation after generation.