*Yawn*. Another Lee "Scratch" Perry release. How many thousand must there be now? New. Old. Repackaged. Dubious. Authentic. Troubling. We have had them all.
If I am being honest, my own preference is for the cavernous depths and endless spatial vistas conjured by the likes of King Tubby (and, leaping into the present, the almost palpable echo chamber created by Rhythm & Sound -- not even Jamaican) to the bizarre sound effects, scatological ravings and cow noises so often tossed off by Perry.
But you can't deny Perry's power and influence, and I do swear by "Arkology". And original seventies releases such as "Super Ape" and "Blackboard Jungle Dub". And numerous albums with his name on them somewhere, such as "Party Time", by The Heptones, and "War Ina Babylon", by Max Romeo. And countless Black Ark singles.
And so here we are in 2010 and Pressure Sounds, the venerable reggae reissue and archival label, gives us twenty more Perry dubs, packaged together under the title "Sound System Scratch". If I understand the back story properly, they are all culled from a collection of one-off dub plates never before heard outside of the Jamaican sound systems of the seventies.
I first caught the dub bug in about 1979, the tail end of the period documented on this disc, when I started listening to what was then 2JJ, which ran a "spiritual" program of a Sunday evening. (If churches played music like this they would have a few more parishioners.) There wasn't much scope for acquiring Jamaican records in Fish Creek, so with the reinvention of 2JJ as 2JJJ this music was lost to me until the reggae reissue boom (which ran in a curious parallel with the lounge music boom) of the 1990s.
Hence there are many people, I am thinking in particular of the Murray Nashes of the world (he being the only person I have ever met who actually had a lot of this stuff on original, ganja-soaked vinyl), who are much better educated about this kind of thing than I am, but I think it's fair to say that I have dived a reasonable distance below the aqueous surface of seventies dub. And I am very pleasantly surprised to be able to say that (1) I don't recall ever having heard any of these particular tracks before and (2) they are all first rate. First rate, I tell you.
Many of the basic rhythm tracks will be familiar to regular listeners. "Big Neck Cut", for example, comes from a track known to me as "Dreadlocks In Moonlight", which appears on "Arkology", and which itself is a close relative of Junior Murvin's "Police and Thieves", and the approximately twenty thousand "versions" that song has begotten. (Or is that "begat"? Begorrah!) This version, though, has Perry's own vocals replaced by some lovely female chorusing. "Lama Lava Mix One", the longest track here at five and a half minutes, is not a million miles away from "Onward Christian Soldiers" (and features the smooth tones of Augustus Pablo's melodica). "The Rightful Organiser" comes from what I think is a Pablo track, but I can't quite put a finger on it. (It's one of the relatively few times that Perry puts himself into the mix, and on this occasion it works well, probably because it's the exception rather than the rule.) And so on.
Much of the disc is resolutely lo-fi, which perhaps confirms the putative nature of the source material. Perry's ego and tiresome self-promoting is put aside and his considerable talents are applied, instead, in the service of figuring out just how far "out" this music could go while still being recognisable as "music". The opening track, "Dub Plate Pressure", at times approximates metal sheets of white noise. And there is not a fake cow noise to be heard.
All in all, this is solid gold Lee "Scratch" Perry from start to finish. As such, it qualifies as perfect Friday afternoon listening around these parts.
