Dub

Dub is more than a genre, it's one of electronic music's most fundamental production techniques coming out of the heart of the Caribbean: Jamaica.

In the early 1970s Jamaican studios, engineers like King Tubby, Lee "Scratch" Perry, and Errol Thompson started taking existing reggae tracks and stripping them down on the mixing desk. Basically they were rethinking the whole mixing console as an instrument.

It happened often live in the studio, adding that distinct human touch to it. Popping the vocal in and out, gutting the arrangement down to the essential drum and bass, then splashing space back in with cavernous reverb, tape echoes, and abrupt filtering.

The technique became so aesthetically coherent and culturally rooted that it graduated from method to genre, while still remaining available as a method that any other genre can borrow (which is exactly how you get "dub techno" as a distinct lineage rather than dub simply being techno).

One place that shows how tight the link between shop, label and sound really was is Rockers International on Orange Street in Kingston, founded by melodica pioneer Augustus Pablo (born Horace Swaby) together with his brother Garth. It grew out of a sound system the two ran called Rockers. Unlike most of the shops on that strip, which were mainly selling rocksteady and dancehall, Rockers focused specifically on dub and roots reggae, both distributing it and putting out productions of its own. Orange Street was once lined with more than 30 record shops and studios and got the nickname "Beat Street", but today Rockers is one of only two record shops left standing there, and it's still run by longtime manager Ainsworth "Mitchie" Williams.

To respect the genre's roots, SEVEN stocks some of the music that is deeply shaped by the early dub sound coming out of Jamaica, and all the sub-genres that borrow this legendary way of modifying and creating music.