1. Blackbeard/Winston EdwardsDub Conference (Winston Edwards & Blackbeard At 10 Downing Street)
You are probably reading this in June 2014, perhaps even much later… decades later…
I have been asked so many times to make lists like this in the past, I thought I would select some unexpected music this time, some that I usually never mention.
These titles were not selected to present some sort of hierarchy, like a charts system. I don’t believe chart systems make sense. Perhaps they used to fifty years ago. Now they don’t say much about where we – meaning all humans on this planet – stand when it comes to our music taste.
OK, so it’s April 2013 and I am standing backstage with Adrian Sherwood in Tokyo and we were speaking about the revolution and music and how important dub was for the evolution of electronic music…
Wait, when I use the term electronic music, I exclude EDM, which is one of these confused and misguided attempts from certain people in the US to reverse everything techno once stood for… I don’t want to go into it for too long, but for me techno always meant that the audience is in this amazing dialogue with the DJ and all become one and experience a musical journey together, discovering the unknown. And NOT masses of sheeple facing in one direction, applauding one person who presses start on a laptop. The city of Detroit couldn’t be a better metaphor for what has been happening to electronic music over the past five years.
So what do we all do now? After my conversation with Adrian Sherwood I realised how key dub and soundsystems were for what drove European dance music in the early 90s. We need to understand what was so important about it and apply that thinking to our time. And we need you the reader, the listener, the musician to support it and to engage.
The future can’t be a creative suicide with people with no attention spans trying to rule the social networks, trying to climb to the top… it’s a road that leads to destruction.
Back to Toyko… it was raining outside. I stepped outside and for the first time Blade Runner felt like it happened a few days ago and not in some distant future… I played Adrian this album over the iPhone, he said he didn’t know it. It was produced in the UK. He was probably being polite because he didn’t want to embarrass me, because he knows better music when it comes to dub [laughs]. However, in 80s Berlin I found this album and I loved it, maybe for the wrong reasons but that’s how it goes.
