The latest offering from Oracle Sound is a package of 6 tracks on vinyl, and a bonus more 3 to download. You can take it as read that everything about Richard Norris’ dub project is bass heavy. However, while joined together by bottom end boom, each number has its own distinctive flavour. Conqueror Dub’s sticks click on snare rims, and its synths shapeshift like smoke. Summoning scenes from Sabres Of Paradise’s Haunted Dancehall, or a slow, sleepwalking / somnambulant skank, down empty Soho market streets, slick with weather, deserted, way after midnight. Before dawn. Rainfall takes its title from its wash of vinyl crackle and static. The sound processing recalling Basic Channel and Stefan Betke aka Pole. Cleaner, clearer notes picking a path through the dense textures designed to induce deep contemplation. A Field In Dub uses siren effects like pinches of spice, spiking its LFO hum, and offsetting the tune’s central snake-charming theremin / Ondes Martenot-esque theme.

Foundation Dub is slightly more strident. Its tunnel of trippy tumbling sequences like distant acidic echoes of trance and progressive house. The moody Fever Dub mimics the Mad Professor manhandling Massive Attack’s Mezzanine. All sparse and spaced-out. Its beats much more “Bristol Sound” – don’t say “trip hop” – than steppers. Its modular melody, sinister and cinematic, winding within a thick stink of skunk. Of the digital bonuses, it’s the re-rub of this cut that’s really hot. Extended into nearly 8 minutes of isolated rattle and descending b-line, mellow mixing desk effects send sections spinning backwards and turn fidgeting detail inside out. Transforming the track into an industrial strength auditory tranquilliser. Stoned, sonically speaking. Featuring filtered horns and ethereal vocals, the concluding Inner Communication is a foray into funkier territory, that rides a faster, skippy rhythm and a sedated disco b-line.  

Richard Norris’ Oracle Sound Volume Three is out now on Group Mind.