David Harrow, now a resident of Los Angeles teaching music, has had a wide and varied career in music from the early 80s onwards. Starting out with Psychic TV and Anne Clark and then in 1988 hooking up with the On U Sound collective before going onto work with Andrew Weatherall (as Blood Sugar and Deanne Day), making techno as Technova and future jazz/ drum 'n' bass as James Hardway and finding time somewhere in the mid 90s to write Billie Ray Martin's worldwide hit Your Loving Arms. He has been drip feeding music through Bandcamp recently, the most recent being a three track release called Melodica Session. Made up of three dub tracks- AtyipcalDub, GadgetDub and WaimeaDub- Melodica Session is a dub joy, modular synth rhythms and lovely, snaking melodica lines on top. Really smart modern dub from a man who has been steeped in it for several decades. Listen and buy here. You won't regret it, promise.
Adrian Sherwood is On U Sound's mixing desk maestro and boss, the man for whom rhythm and delay is an artform. Sherwood's back catalogue as producer and remixer takes in some harder industrial sounds and a dash of mid- 80s electro too but it's the dub we're here for today. Back in 2010 the Test Pressing website kicked off a series of longer mixes in tribute to the great producers and began with a forty- five minute compilation of Sherwood tracks put together by Apiento and Tim H. I found the Sherwood one recently while digging around in the hard drive looking for something else and you'll be hard pressed to find a better soundtrack to three quarters of an hour today.
The Producers Series Volume One
- African Head Charge: Pursuit
- Dub Syndicate: Ravi Shankar Pt. 1
- African Head Charge: Heading For Glory
- African Head Charge: No, Don't Follow Fashion
- Doctor Pablo: Doctor Who
- Creation Rebel: African Space
- African Head Charge: Dinosaur's Lament
- Dub Syndicate: Night Train
- African Head Charge: Throw It Away
- African Head Charge: Stebeni's Theme
Superb. Virus Dubs was one of my favourite albums/compilations last year, but really he's been on an unstoppable dub juggernaut since the first lockdown and there's no sign of slowing down now. And a bargain price!
ReplyDeleteAnd the Sherwood mix is the icing on the cake. All brilliant but including 4 personal favourites in Ravi Shankar, African Space, Dinosaur's Lament and Stebeni's Theme. Absolutely fantastic.