As the 70s turned to the 80s, echo chambers got bigger. Digital tech brought new clarity and definition to reggae, and the grit of roots music was left behind as Jamaican tastes moved towards the toughness and pressure of dancehall. The warmth of old analogue studios like King Tubby’s or Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry’s Black Ark was gone, but the processing power of the silicon chip meant sounds could bounce around the echo chamber to infinity.
The possibilities of the modern studio helped transform Dub Syndicate from a simple alias for Adrian Sherwood’s mixing desk experiments at the start of the decade – when the credit appeared on Cry Tuff Dub Encounter Chapter III by legendary deejay Prince Far-I – to a living, breathing band driven forward by master drummer Style Scott at the end of it. In Dub Syndicate’s music, sounds don’t distort or degrade, they get mixed up in a dubbing session that never ends. Instruments recorded in different continents are brought together by multitrack magic, and voices beam in mysteriously from across the spectrum and history of reggae, from Far-I to Perry.
By the time of the period covered by the new box set Out Here On The Perimeter, Dub Syndicate had moved away from the industrial-tinged beat workouts of their early days – like Brian Eno and David Byrne’s My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts with punk attitude – towards a kaleidoscopic dub symphony of man and machine in bionic harmony. Scott, who would be tragically murdered at his own home in 2014, had been part of The Roots Radics, one of Jamaica’s greatest ever bands, and the riddims they laid down for Henry ‘Junjo’ Lawes consolidated a new era of rhythmic minimalism for reggae – with renewed focus on drums, bass, and the space between – in hits for Barrington Levy, Yellowman, Johnny Osbourne and Gregory Isaacs. But when drum machines and synthesizers started to push more traditional musicians out of a job, Scott had more time on his hands.
The drummer strengthened his alliance with Sherwood and his British On-U Sound label, a relationship that began when Scott was touring the UK with Far-I in the late 70s. By the 1987 Lee Perry album Time Boom X De Devil Dead, Scott was back with Roots Radics colleagues Bingy Bunny and Errol ‘Flabba’ Holt, opening a new chapter for Dub Syndicate as an elite instrumental unit.
Dub Syndicate didn’t write songs so much as lay down chants, grooves and modes. Often, they artfully adapted tunes from elsewhere, such as Serge Gainsbourg’s ‘Je T’Aime’ on 1989’s Strike The Balance (the earliest album included here) or, most memorably, the Dr Who theme on the 1984 album North Of The River Thames. By the late 80s, backing tracks would often be laid down by Scott and co at Channel One or Leggo studios in Jamaica, and then extravagantly embellished and dubbed up by Sherwood at On-U Sound HQ back in the UK. The result was hard and heavy, but with a surreal edge that sat awkwardly with influential UK roots reggae radio shows like Kiss FM’s Mannaseh, and a playful collage aesthetic unsuited to the devout atmosphere of the revered Jah Shaka dances.
So, Dub Syndicate did their own thing (as the subtitle says) out on the perimeter, releasing well-received albums on On-U Sound, nurturing a cult following via free-thinking BBC radio shows such as John Peel and Steve Barker’s On The Wire, and making a name for themselves as able and adaptable collaborators.
Strike The Balance is spare and minimal and shows Scott’s dancehall roots on relentless stepping instrumentals such as ‘Shout It Out’ and ‘JA Minor’. Bim Sherman’s vocal adds an unearthly edge to Lloyd Robinson’s enduring rude boy-era anthem ‘Cuss Cuss’, and most striking of all is a cover of Lloyd Parks’s brooding 70s song ‘Mafia’, with Sherman duetting with an ominous cackling vocoder which could be some implacable enforcer from the distant future.
By the time of Stoned Immaculate, whose title track features a hypnotic Jim Morrison monologue taken from An American Prayer, the echo chambers were set to overdrive. Crucial to Sherwood’s productions are early digital audio processing units such as the AMS DMX delay/pitch shifter and the Eventide Harmoniser, devices which let the user transform sounds in countless ways, but keep the audio fresh and immediate compared to equipment of the old analogue days. ‘Wadada (Means Love)’ displays Sherwood’s full range of tricks and cubist sound shapes: ping-pong effects like you’re crawling through a metal ventilation shaft, snare drums which could be at the bottom of a well, and swooping arcs of echo which spiral up and up like Shepherd tones.
The AMS unit, particularly sought after today, boasts advanced features such as the ability to ‘lock in’ audio and trigger it again – effectively, making digital sound accessible to play just like a sampler. In Dub Syndicate’s recordings, chunks of digital sound are twisted around but never lose their edge, and the mixing and remixing process can go on forever.
Sherwood’s mixing also plays with the listener’s sense of scale, with geometries only possible with the hard contours of digital sound. It’s one reason why Dub Syndicate’s music is less suited to the sound systems that are reggae’s natural context, and more to the headphones or hi-fi where the stereo spectrum can be heard in full effect. In the opening couple of minutes of ‘Roots Commandment’, the opening track from 1993’s amazing Echomania, voices give thanks and praises to Jah, there is call and response between the left and right channel, Rasta chants begin but quickly stop, and the exclamation “Wha’?!” is` echoed upwards to infinity (probably courtesy of the AMS DMX’s magical pitch-shifting feature). The experience is like hearing disembodied voices, and while the group were moving further from reggae’s mainstream, it deepens the mystery of where the music comes from and who’s making it. The On-U Sound aesthetic was the result of careful preparation, a critical ear for listening, and Sherwood’s dynamic approach at the mixing desk, but someone listening to Dub Syndicate in the early 90s could be forgiven for thinking the machines had taken over the studio.
Three years passed before 1994’s Ital Breakfast, the last full album included on Out Here On The Perimeter – like all the albums here, it’s also being made available in a new LP edition. Ital Breakfast has a laidback, often jazzy feel, nurtured by Dean Frazer’s gentle ruminative horn lines, and Skip McDonald’s guitar, the latter almost country-style on ‘No Lightweight Sound’ on sliding like Ry Cooder on ‘The Jewel’. The album also contains one of Dub Syndicate’s mightiest moments, with legendary deejay I-Roy sounding as powerful as ever spreading wisdom on the title track.
They continued laying down jams until close to Scott’s death, but by the mid-90s, others had started to catch up. Dub Syndicate were both pioneers and proof of concept of making monster grooves from samples, collage, collaboration and remix, and you find their legacy less in reggae than with global beats heads such as Asian Dub Foundation, Transglobal Underground and Loop Guru, or even hip hop adjacent magpies such as Depth Charge and Mo’Wax.
But the package also includes Obscured By Version, a set of versions and riddims mixed using material from back in the day. This is Dub Syndicate stripped back to the bones, the vocals largely gone, and Sherwood’s feel for modern bass music and dancehall – something that dubstep producer Pinch sought out for their Late Night Endless collaboration – in full effect on ‘Plains Of Africa (Echo, Echo, Echo)’ and ‘Right Back To Your Soul’. In Out Here On The Perimeter, you can find secret spaces and futuristic dimensions that still haven’t been fully mapped out, even to this day.
