2021 - Mad Professor - The First Dubs Are The Deepest -
40 Years of Dub PT 2 @320
The idea of the front room studio came in 1975 from a visit to an audio and hifi exhibition at Earl’s Court, where I was eyeing up a Teac 4 track machine. The salesman who was a few years older than me, was telling me how much joy his personal setup was giving him. The first sessions were simple and raw, with drums on track 1, piano and guitar on track 2, bass on track 3, any vocals would be on track 4 Effects were a home made spring reverb, taken from a practical electronics circuit diagram The tape echo was from a Akai 4000DS mk2 and a 2 transistor phaser developed from my early hobbyist days. The tracks on this album is from those first sessions, up until the first Ampex 16 track sessions with Horsemouth Wallace overdubbing his drums alongside the Terry Crooks originals. The sonic difference between 8 track half inch and 16 track 2 inch is evident on the 2 versions of Naturally raw, mixed 6 months apart. Even Dub has evolved beyond being produced in Kingston, the raw, earthy African spirit remains a fundamental part of the Afro-electronic mission, underwritten in the sub-consciousness of the engineer / producer! Drums: Kingsley Chambers, Terry Crooks, Leroy Horsemouth Wallace, Angus Gayle, Drumton Ward Bass: Preacher, Kirk Service, Black Steel, Larry Professor Vocals: Sister Audrey, Delena, Patricia Smith, Rockaway Keyboards: Dave Morgan, Norman Collins, Flea, Pepper Guitars: Black Steel, Tony Benjamin, Delroy Brass: Roger & Tabanko Produced and mixed Mad ProfessorRecorded at Ariwa Bruce Road, Ariwa Peckham. (BrokenSilence)
1967 - Jefferson Airplane - After Bathing at Baxter's @320
The Jefferson Airplane opened 1967 with Surrealistic Pillow and closed it with After Bathing at Baxter's, and what a difference ten months made. Bookending the year that psychedelia emerged in full bloom as a freestanding musical form, After Bathing at Baxter's was among the purest of rock's psychedelic albums, offering few concessions to popular taste and none to the needs of AM radio, which made it nowhere remotely as successful as its predecessor, but it was also a lot more daring. The album also showed a band in a state of ferment, as singer/guitarist Marty Balin largely surrendered much of his creative input in the band he'd founded, and let Paul Kantner and Grace Slick dominate the songwriting and singing on all but one cut ("Young Girl Sunday Blues"). The group had found the preceding album a little too perfect, and not fully representative of the musicians or what they were about, and they were determined to do the music their way on Baxter's; additionally, they'd begun to see how far they could take music (and music could take them) in concert, in terms of capturing variant states of consciousness.
Essentially, After Bathing at Baxter's was the group's attempt to create music that captured what the psychedelic experience sounded and felt like to them from the inside; on a psychic level, it was an introverted exercise in music-making and a complete reversal of the extroverted experience in putting together Surrealistic Pillow. Toward that end, they were working "without a net," for although Al Schmitt was the nominal producer, he gave the group the freedom to indulge in any experimentation they chose to attempt, effectively letting them produce themselves. They'd earned the privilege, after two huge hit singles and the Top Five success of the prior album, all of which had constituted RCA's first serious new rock success (and the label's first venture to the music's cutting edge) since Elvis Presley left the Army. The resulting record was startlingly different from their two prior LPs; there were still folk and blues elements present in the music, but these were mostly transmuted into something very far from what any folksinger or bluesman might recognize. Kantner, Jorma Kaukonen, and Jack Casady cranked up their instruments; Spencer Dryden hauled out an array of percussive devices that was at least twice as broad as anything used on the previous album; and everybody ignored the length of what they were writing and recording, or how well they sang, or how cleanly their voices meshed. The group emerged four months later with one of the rawest, most in-your-face records to come out of the psychedelic era, and also a maddeningly uneven record, exciting and challenging in long stretches, yet elsewhere very close to stultifyingly boring, delightful in its most fulfilling moments (which were many), but almost deliberately frustrating in its digressions, and amid all of that, very often beautiful.
The album's 11 songs formed five loosely constructed "suites," that didn't ease listeners into those structures. Opening "The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil" (a Kantner-authored tribute to Fred Neil) amid a cascading wash of feedback leading to a slashing guitar figure, the band's three singers struggle to meld their voices and keep up. A softer, almost folk-like interlude, highlighted by Slick's upper-register keening, breaks up the beat until the guitar, bass, and drums crash back in, with a bit of piano embellishment. Then listeners get to the real break, an almost subdued interlude on the guitars, and a return to the song at a more frenzied pitch, the guitar part dividing and evolving into ever more brittle components until a crescendo and more feedback leads to "A Small Package of Value Will Come to You, Shortly." This brilliantly comical and clever percussion showcase co-authored by Spencer Dryden and the band's manager, Bill Thompson, is a million miles beyond any drummer's featured number in any popular band of that era, and it leads into Marty Balin's "Young Girl Sunday Blues," the most rhythmically consistent song here and one of a tiny handful of moments that seem to slightly resemble the band's past work. The aforementioned tracks comprise just the first suite, designated "Steetmasse."
"The War Is Over" suite opens with "Martha," the album's folk-style interlude, almost a throwback to the group's original sound, except that the listener suddenly finds himself in the midst of a psychedelic delirium, heralded by the dissonant accompaniment and a high-energy fuzztone guitar solo (spinning out sitar-like notes) coming out of nowhere and a speed change that slows the tempo to zero, as though the tape (or time, or the listener's perception of it) were stretching out, and the pounding, exuberant "Wild Tyme," a celebration of seemingly uninhibited joy. "Hymn to the Older Generation" is made up of Kaukonen's "The Last Wall of the Castle," an alternately slashing and chiming guitar pyrotechnic showcase that rivaled anything heard from Jimi Hendrix or the Who that year, and Grace Slick's gorgeous "Rejoyce," a hauntingly beautiful excursion into literary psychedelia, whose James Joyce allusions carry the Lewis Carroll literary allusions of the previous album's "White Rabbit" into startlingly new and wonderful (if discursive) directions and depths. "How Suite It Is" opens with the album's single, the lean, rhythmic "Watch Her Ride," whose pretty harmonies and gently psychedelic lyrics persuaded RCA that this was their best shot at AM airplay and, true to form on an album filled with contradictions, it leads into "Spare Chaynge," the crunching, searing, sometimes dirge-like nine-minute jam by Kaukonen, Dryden, and Casady that wasn't ever going to get on AM radio -- ever -- and, indeed, might well initially repel any Airplane fan who only knew their hit singles. "Shizoforest Love Suite" closes the album with Slick's "Two Heads," with its vocal acrobatics and stop-and-go beat, and "Won't You Try"/"Saturday Afternoon," the latter Kantner's musical tribute to the first San Francisco "Be-In" (memorialized more conventionally by the Byrds on "Renaissance Fair"); it features many of the more subdued, relaxed, languid moments on the record, divided by a killer fuzz-laden guitar solo.
Needless to say, this is not the album for neophytes -- "Spare Chaynge" remains an acquired taste, a lot more aimless than, say, the extended jams left behind by the Quicksilver Messenger Service, though it did point the way toward what Kaukonen and Casady would aim for more successfully when they formed Hot Tuna. But most of the rest is indisputably among the more alluring musical experimentation of the period, and Kantner's "The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil" and "Watch Her Ride," as well as Balin's "Young Girl Sunday Blues," proved that the group could still rock out with a beat, even if not so prettily or cleanly as before. (AllMusic)
It's a sad irony that in the 1980s and '90s, many of the great artists of soul and R&B suffered musically at the hands of those who professed to love them the most. After soul had dropped off the major-label radar in favor of hip-hop and new jack sounds, a number of smaller companies stepped forward to record veteran artists who were still giving their all on the road, but for every truly inspired release from labels such as Malaco, Bullseye, or Alligator, there were a dozen others which featured rote, generic production and arrangements which attempted to recapture the thrilling sound of soul's glory days without coming within driving distance of conjuring their ineffable magic.
Solomon Burke was one of the greatest talents of '60s soul, whose strong, burnished voice resonated with a churchy fervor that could speak volumes about either triumph or hurt, but while he continued to record regularly through the '70s, '80s and '90s and always sounded splendid, the records themselves often weren't much to write home about, with Burke using his gifts to prop up second-rate material or re-record tunes he'd performed definitively in the past. So it's good news indeed to report that Burke's new album, Don't Give Up on Me, is nothing short of revelatory, a superb set which presents "the King of Rock and Soul" at the very top of his form. Singer and songwriter Joe Henry produced the set, and rather than trying to replicate the sound of a vintage Jerry Wexler session, he's taken a very different approach, going for a spare and open sound, with nothing but a subdued rhythm section, a guitar, and an organ (the latter played by Rudy Copeland, who performs the same honors at the church where Burke preaches) accompanying Burke on most of these 11 songs.
Henry also put out a call for material worthy of Burke's gifts, and a number of his better-known fans responded, including Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, Van Morrison, Elvis Costello, Brian Wilson, and Nick Lowe, all of whom contributed songs to the project. But for all the songwriting starpower on deck, the focus is squarely on Solomon Burke throughout, and he proves he's lost none of the power, force, or dramatic intensity of his glory days. Henry's low-key production captures the nooks and crannies of Burke's voice, and he delivers a performance worthy of a great actor on each cut, from the deep soul of "Don't Give Up on Me" and the blues-based swagger of "Stepchild" to the inspired tall tales of "Diamond in Your Mind" and the near-operatic passion of "The Judgement."
His voice is in superb shape, too, sounding no less powerful at age 66 than he did in his glory days, and with a depth of emotion and gift for phrasing that's only grown with the passage of time. In many ways, Don't Give Up on Me most closely resembles Johnny Cash's superb American Recordings, in that the spare simplicity of the album's presentation reveals the rich complexities of the singer's gifts as they've rarely been allowed in the past; while it's a very different kettle of fish from his classic sides for Atlantic in the 1960s, Don't Give up on Me leaves no doubt that Solomon Burke is still one of the finest voices of his time, and anyone who has ever been moved by the power of soul music needs to hear this album. (AllMusic)
If you think about it correctly, Neil Fraser is actually the longest-serving, continuously active to this day Dub-Maker of the Planet. Congratulations! He has been producing in his living room since the 4-Track-Ariwa-Studios was founded in 1979 Dubs. In 1982 the legendary album "Dub Me Crazy ”, followed by 11 more albums with the same (sub) title: Milestones of the Dub-History. Now he is celebrating with "40 years of Dub“(Ariwa) himself. He dug deep into the mountain of his recording tapes and - it seems to me - put together his personal favorites from 40 years. What a very personal choice suggests is the fact that its just great Dub-Hits (what a contradictio in adiecto!) Cannot be found here. That makes the album sound fresh and fresh, especially since the crazy professor has remastered his recordings. Many of the titles listed cannot be found in the Ariwa Back Catalog, so it is quite possible that there are previously unpublished ones Dubs of past decades can be heard - unless the madman simply gave the tracks new titles. Be that as it may: The album is fun and the stylistic development of the professor and his music is exciting. With the last track "Forward 2 Africa" he has arrived in the here and now - oh well, he is even a bit ahead of his time! (DubBlog)
Salif Keita's glowing 2002 album is remixed for the electro-dancefloor by a largely French-based crew. "Madan" and "Moussoulou" are the most popular subjects, notching up three versions apiece. This process is anything but repetitive, as each knob-twiddling team manages to shunt off in wildly contrasting directions.
Gekko's "Madan" is given a trouncing momentum, decorated with near-intangible swirls, bolstering Keita's female chorus. The Tim Paris alternative involves a bluntly thudding minimalism, its simple-minded bass beat underpinning a repeated n'goni string-figure. Salif himself is noticeably absent. Then, The Boldz funk up the same song, justifying these multiple trips.
"Moussoulou" fares even better, perfectly illustrating how the remixer's art can be sensitive to the integrity of the original work, yet still boldly experimenting with the raw material. Plenty of acoustic content remains. Ark (Guillaume Berroyer) dices and chops, interrupting Keita's vocals, cutting the track's naked matter up into thin slices. New rhythms are created from vocal fragments. Then, Osunlade lends a Sly'n'Robbie backbone to the same song, using a sped-up dub reggae bassline and glancing snare-strikes.
The lone appearance of "Ana Na Ming" turns out to be a wise choice for La Funk Mob, stuck right near the end, but still a pronounced highlight. It revolves around a compulsive melodic line, quite simply handled. Its climax features a massing of instrumental activity, settled down on a burbling synth-line. This is just as enticing as some of the more radical re-thinks; relatively pure when set beside the preceding electro-collage tendencies.
"Here" has two alternatives.Frederic Galliano throws down a gruff house beat, overlaid with tiny loops, taking pulse-repeats to their shortened limit. Stark and pointed.Doctor L's extended remix has significant instrumental additions,with heavy cello riffs and a willowy flute.Things settle down into a mordant mood before breaking out in complete dub fragmentation.
The project's chief problem could be the under-usage of Keita's voice itself, but in a spread of stripped-down interpretations this can have a striking effect when he does rear up into the mix... (BBC)
Comateens were formed in New York in 1978 by Ramona Jan (guitar), Nicholas Dembling (aka Nick O. Teen, Nick North, Nick West) (bass, vocals), and a drum machine. After Lyn Byrd (synthesizer, vocals), Oliver North (guitar, vocals) and Harry Viderci (drums) joined the group, they recorded their first single, The Ramona Jan-penned songs Danger Zone and Elizabeth's Lover (not released at the time) and Diana Dominicci's Cool Chick. Jan left the band in 1980 and Comateens recorded their self-titled debut LP in 1981. The album became a cult favorite among college hipsters, especially the band's remake of “The Munsters Theme". However, the Comateens actually gained a larger following in Europe, wherein the group's quirks – such as the necrophilia tale “Cool Chick" – were more easily digested. The band released two more LPs – 1983's Pictures on a String and 1984's Deal With It – and then split up in 1985. Byrd and Nicholas West (Dembling) eventually reunited in West and Byrd.
This set contains the three albums released by Comateens with bonus cd of demo's.
CD1 - Self titled debut album from 1981
CD2 - Pictures On A String from1983
CD3 - Deal With It from 1984
CD4 - Demo's
This has been in my to post folder for a very long time, time it was posted!!!
So Box 50 is here for your pleasure, Concha starts this week with her selections form 1 to 8, then come my (Reb) tunes from 9 to 16 and finally Andy closes the box with his tracks from 17 to 24.
Hi there Vibes will be two years old at the end of September and I thought some regulars to the site might like to help us celebrate with a special Box Of Vibes comp.
So if you would like to take part then all you need to do is suggest and couple of tracks to be included into the compilation. Just comment with your name so we can say on the comp who suggested which tracks, they can be from any decade and of any musical genre you wish. I will then try to compile it.
So on this post add two tracks that you think we should include. Put the artist / band followed by the track and the year, can you please also add the album/EP or single they come from as well which should make them easier for me to find.
Just drop the track titles into the comments below, I will then search for the tracks suggested. If I can't find a 320 copy, I will ask you to email me a 320 copy of your suggestions.
The final day to submit your tracks is Friday 18th September, which will give me time source the tracks and compile the comp.
I have extended the closing date for tracks by a week, to Friday 25th September.
The 22 tracks submitted already, I have already collected and tested to make sure they are real 320. We are 2 on the 30th of September, so any new tracks submitted, will work on collecting them as they are suggested so tags will need doing on them, the others are ready, just need to sort the running order. After the 25th and with us not posting on Sundays any more can work on them then.
1965 - My Generation (50th Anniversary Super Deluxe)
[5CD Box Set, 2016] @320
The Who got bigger, brainier, better and generally tougher as they grew. But they were never as fiercely raw as they were on their first album, My Generation. In 36 minutes, they tore through the conventions of British rock 'n' roll until they found a place they could call their own. Five decades after its release, the album stands as one of rock music's greatest debuts.
For its 50th anniversary, My Generation has been expanded to a five-CD Super Deluxe Edition that adds new mixes, B-sides, singles, alternate takes and demos. And over the course of more than 75 tracks, the set sketches out a template the Who would build from and break down several times during their career, pulling in everything from R&B rave-ups and chiming pop to scorching rock 'n' roll and proto-punk anarchy.
While much of this material has surfaced on other collections, including previous anniversary editions of My Generation, the set attempts to wrangle most of the period's songs into one place. A few strays from earlier editions, mostly different alternate versions, are missing, but the Super Deluxe Edition is the most representative collection of a pivotal year in the life of the Who, starting with the "I Can't Explain" single from early 1965.
The center of it all is the My Generation LP, included here in a newly remastered mono mix and a stereo mix of the album from 2014 that was previously available only on iTunes. Both versions heighten the guitars and pulsing rhythm section that drive songs like "The Kids Are Alright," "A Legal Matter" and the classic title tune. The bonus tracks here -- shuffled between mono and stereo mixes, and including some of the singles and B-sides released before and after the album came out -- serve as jagged bookends to the LP's dozen tracks.
It's a vivid portrait of the Who's first several months as professional recording artists. All these years later, the explosive clash of garage-rock R&B and serrated pop from this period that later helped form their identity sounds like a launching point of things to come -- from Roger Daltrey's throaty vocals to Pete Townshend's whipping guitar attacks to that thing Keith Moon did on the drums where he was never quite on the beat but powered the rhythm all the same.
The weakest disc here, the one dedicated to almost a dozen Townshend demos from the era, provide the sketches (and, in one case, just a fragment) for the full-band takes. They're interesting as starting points, but they don't approach the force of the released versions. (Three of the songs are brand new to Who fans; Townshend discovered the stashed-away demo tapes in 2015.)
And that's why My Generation matters the most. As the band grew and got more popular, Townshend took control as its chief songwriter and architect. This Super Deluxe Edition of the Who's debut is all about the band -- before the rock operas, fringe jackets and trashed hotels -- in all of its raging glory. (Ultimate Classic Rock)
