Dubbing treats music more as modeling clay than copyrightable material, rendering no mix original, as it extracts bits from existing music and places it in new contexts. Dub is both a genre of music and a technique that removes the vocal track away from its backing track. The remaining accompaniment track is then altered by the artist with a variety of methods, including drop-out, extreme equalisation, long and short delay, space echo, reverb, flange, phase, noise, gates, echo feedback, shotgun snare drums, rubber bass, zipping highs, and cavernous lows. These effects are generally used to enhance the existing track, but when they are deployed by a dubmaster they have the potential to create new moods and moments. In this way, the dubmaster is like a sculptor, as he directly manipulates existing material. Dub also anticipated the later remix culture in the 1970s with version albums such as Rupie Edwards’s Yamaha Skank, demonstrating that dub was more than a style but was a new way of thinking about music and creativity.

Works: William Gibson: Neuromancer (356); Joe Gibbs: African Dub All-Mighty; Augustus Pablo: King Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptown (356), Africa Must Be Free By 1983 (356), East of the River Nile (357); Lee Perry: Super Ape (357); Rupie Edwards: Yamaha Skank (357); Anonymous: My Conversation.

Index Classifications: 1900s, Popular

Contributed by: Sarah Kirkman