dancehall dub

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Take a virtual cab ride around Jamaica!

no service

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mo’ bama jelly

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Election day dub.

build me down dub

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Deniis Hopper, blue velvet and laughing gas not included.

Ambient Dub was a phrase first coined by the now defunct Beyond record label in early 1990s in Birmingham, England. Their defining series of albums “Ambient Dub 1, 2, through to 4 inspired many, including sound engineer and producer Bill Laswell, who used the same phrase in his music project Divination, where he collaborates with different musicians on each album (though sometimes the same ones are on more than one of the albums such as Tetsu Inoue and others). Laswell also presented Ambient dub and Ambient house music on albums by his collaboration project Axiom Dub, featuring recording artists the Orb, Jah Wobble, Jaki Liebezeit and DJ Spooky.

Ambient dub involves the genre melding of dub styles made famous by King Tubby and other Jamaican sound artists with DJ inspired ambient electronica, complete with all the inherent drop-outs, echo, equalization and psychedelic electronic effects. As writer and performer David Toop explains in an early Beyond Records newsletter, “Dub music is like a long echo delay, looping through time…turning the rational order of musical sequences into an ocean of sensation.”

Dub is a form of music which evolved out of reggae in the late 1960s. The dub sound consists predominantly of instrumental remixes of existing recordings and is achieved by significantly manipulating and reshaping the recordings, usually by removing the vocals from an existing music piece, emphasizing the drum and bass frequencies or ‘riddim‘, adding extensive echo and reverb effects, and dubbing occasional snippets of lyrics from the original version.

It is widely accepted that Jamaican musicians Osbourne “King Tubby” Ruddock, and Lee “Scratch” Perry pioneered the style in the 1960s and early 1970s. Ruddock and Perry each called upon the mixing desk as an instrument, with the deejay or “selector” playing the role of the artist or performer. These early ‘dub’ examples can be looked upon as the prelude to many dance and pop music genres.

Today, the word ‘dub’ is used widely to describe the re-formatting of music of various genres into typically instrumental, rhythm-centric adaptations.