SLICKnBOBBY / Belly Dub / Touching Bass

South London label, Touching Bass, run by Errol and Alex Rita, have a 45 in shops by SLICKnBOBBY. I think the moniker refers to the music, rather than the musicians, since there are 7 folks involved. Belly Dub skanks to a fairly banging, broken beat. Its bottom end a powerful pulse. The guitars and keys are all echoed fragments, but blasts of sorta mariachi brass – sax and trumpet – cement a Spanish feel to the melodies. The track is whipped by wild effects, soaked in Forbidden Planet Sci-Fi atmospherics, and there’s also a touch of Tuareg / Tinariwen-esque twang. OSTOB on the flip is much more laidback. Part jazzy, dubby post-rock (think Doug Scharin’s H.I.M. or Taikokissie’s Dub Passengers) and part trip hop. Rolling, relaxing, head nodding stuff, it’s a river of warm swells and warmer bass-line. After a false fade, the band burst back more musical, with pretty chimes and modulated melodic drones. You can catch the collective live at Adventures In Dub, on June 5th, hosted at The Bureau Of Silly Ideas in Brixton. 

Om Unit & Soreab / Pressure 3D / Baroque Sunburst

Om Unit and Soreab collaborate on 2 tracks of seriously heavyweight drum and bass-driven abstraction, which have been cut to a super loud 12. Seismic, shapeshifting, body-pounding, pulse-racing dub techno psychedelia they are certainly not recommended for the faint hearted. Al Wootton’s remix, however, tames Last Breath a tad. Still banging, its mutating is straightened out into a hypnotic house march. Its skanking B-line detailed with drum circle rattle, ethereal chants and wild washes of delay. 

Om Unit  / Euphoria Dubs

In a follow up to his brilliant spaced / bass-ed out rework of Mr Fingers’ Can You Feel It?, Om Unit has released a new EP of rave revisited. Taking a handful of favourites for a slo-mo swim through E-flavoured treacle, the results are a set of ambient dubstep / dub techno deconstructions.  Future Sound Of London’s Papua New Guinea is stripped to just the half-speed B-line and beats. Bleeps and trippy gating backing Lisa Gerrard’s famous shamanic vocal. The Beloved’s Sun Rising receives similar treatment, with Jon Marsh and the beautiful Abbess Hildegard Of Bingen choral sample lost in bass, while pretty ping-ponging sequences, double-dipped, turn gently acidic. An instrumental mix removes Marsh and the medieval, putting more focus on the emotive minor key strings. 

Harikuyamaku / Dub Islomania / Lawson Entertainment

Harikuyamaku is an Okinawa-based producer who focuses on fusing local traditional music with dub techniques. He was central to the recent collaboration between Akio Nagase and Yukino Inamine, and here he takes tracks by Inamine and other regional artists, their folk songs, woodwinds, koto and sanshin, and reimagines them as rocking roots reggae. The album’s highlights are probably its heaviest moments. 369 Dub surrounds Hidekatsu’s Diggory Kenrick-esque flute with digidub bass, spring reverb thunder claps, Mad Professor-like wah-wah EQ trickery and drums that whack like echoed industrial collisions. Dub Season subjects an Inamine tune, Shiki Kuduchi, to extended episodes of extravagant, rippling reverb and delay, and showers of soundclash effects. 

Feel Free Hi Fi / Voyageur / ZamZam Sounds

Both sides of this 7 from Minnesota duo, Feel Free Hi Fi, are slow, serious, heavy digital roots. Voyageur cuts up fractured Fairlight voices – a la Art Of Noise’s BeatBox – and first sets them skanking, then climbing in complex, collaged choruses. The resultant melody matches the mood of Alpha & Omega’s spiritual vision of the Far East. On the flip, Underground’s bass buzzes in a very Jahtari-esque fashion. 

Babe Roots / Mi Feel It / Newdubhall

Italian duo Alessandro Verina and Andrea Perini aka Babe Roots have a new single out on Japanese label, Newdubhall. The record is interesting, in part, because it’s a cover. Both sides are re-imaginings of tracks by the Jamaican dub poet, Michael Smith, who worked with Linton Kwesi Johnson and Dennis Bovell, before he was murdered, stoned to death on the streets of Kingston, in 1983. 

The original Mi Feel It was a spritely skank that inhabited Babylon’s concrete jungles, cursed government’s twisting of justice and equality, and warned of insurrection / rebellion building in the shadows. Predicting 1981’s Brixton riots. Babe Roots’ retelling, narrated by Wayne Bryan, marries dark dub techno textures with a moody, Massive Attack-esque loop.* Roots was a revolutionary, raw 6 and 1/2 minutes of menacing nyabinghi. The Babe Roots version is a far mellower, muted Rhythm & Sound-like reading, that showcases the sweet vocals Senegalese singer Galas. 

*It reminds me of Brooklyn Funk Essentials’ Dilly Dally. 

Anji / Reggae UFO / Blind Beats Sound

Anji is a 13 year old, blind Japanese school boy. His debut release, on his own label, Blind Beats Sound, was co-produced by respected Tokyo-based electronica artist, Compuma. The 7’s A-side, Reggae UFO, opens with an intro that resembles Close Encounters Of The Third Kind’s 5 tones. Following an eruption of echo, these trebly notes solo, accompanied by other keys that mimic a bass-ier organ and scratchy skanking guitar. The results are like a lo-fi Bontempi or Omnichord exotica approximation of an alien tropics and recall the work of Anji’s fellow countrymen Videotapemusic and Emerson Kitamura.