Massive new night

Prancehall and Hanna’s new night
This is the new night from PRANCEHALL tomorrow – Thursday 17th April, Visions Video Bar, Dalston: “Next Thursday is the start of my new night with Hanna who does the House Party events.”

What a wicked line up!

Bass Science at the Big Chill House on Thursday

Bass Science are playing a rare London gig – they’re based based in Tokyo and LA so don’t come to London much. Worth a look in because they make really excellent heavy dub electronics. Check out their myspace page.

London is Free: Flomotion Live – Little Dragon And Bass Science
Bass Science are Tokyo-based MattB (RaNDom) and LA-based Steve Nalepa who specialise in low end , deep pocket rhythms, crunchy distortion, glitchy mouth percussion, blips, bleeps and a heavy dose of dub delay!

The event is taking place on Thursday April 17th from 7pm to 1am.

Dave Stelfox on White Reggae in the Guardian

Gwaan Dave!

The problem with white reggae has always been that reggae depends for its force on its context: the rich rock insider’s take on I Shot the Sheriff can never really capture the intensity of a song about struggling for freedom and killing a policeman. Then there’s the perpetually thorny issue of white performers co-opting the culture of a historically oppressed minority.

All of which makes it surprising that there is a new crop of white reggae performers, eschewing the melanin-deficient basslines and embarrassing attempts at patois that have caught out their predecessors. These artists even market themselves not to the crossover market but to hardcore reggae fans – including those in Jamaica. Maybe, finally, there is white reggae that is more than a pale imitation of the real thing.

Gutter on Night Dubbing

Did you know Imagination made a dub album? I didn’t until I found this. I can quite happily listen to a reggae dub album without having heard the original versions, though it does sometimes concern me that I’m not really appreciating the engineer’s art because I don’t know the original song. In pop terms, it would be like listening to The Human League’s “Love & Dancing” remix album without having ever heard “Dare”, which would be an insane thing to do, surely?

Yeah, I was always a huge fan of Love and Dancing (I put the Hard Times remix on my Fake It Til You Make It: 80s Dance Music In Dub mix that I did a few years back), much more so than Dare. I was always a version man!

But the Imagination dub record – which was before Love and Dancing – was a very big record for me, first time round. Back then everyone in Essex were big imagination fans (though admittedly few were also Cabaret Voltaire fans). But Night Dubbing, which I had on a shonky little tape, was something else and confused most people, though for me it was a direct link between this and the Scientist stuff I was beginning to access at that time. We used to pass round the box at lunch times at school, reading the tracks and marvelling at the idea that they could be so drastically remodelled. I remember when the trendies were going mad over the Peech Boys’ Don’t Make Me Wait a few years later and I kept on thinking “Have you actually heard Imagination?” Of course the big debate at the time was “Are they gay?” It was obvious that Leee John was but the hard man soul boys couldn’t leave it alone. The NF types were a different matter. I really liked the way that it was obviously derived from gay dance music while avoiding hi-nrg cliche, and the way that it looped around (without actually confronting) the heteronormativity of reggae. It made perfect sense in the context of electro and (just) pre-AIDS dance music. I don’t think it’s wrong to think of this record as a mountain rather than a mole hill – it was an explicit link in the chain of UK derivations of black American dance music that led onto the rave scene, in Essex at least, and the sheer intoxicating drugginess of Night Dubbing created the right climate. Dub is black psychedelia after all and this fits right in with Hendrix, though it was never quite extreme enough; too much reverb’ed piano, not enough low end or noise. Then again it was a HUGE fuck record for a couple of years. A bit of a landmark for me, this one, though not as much as African Dub Chapter 3 or 2×45.

Woofah 2 is OUT

Been too busy with, well, stuff to actually announce this on the blog! It’s huge, it’s fat, it’s great – Woofah 2. Now 64 pages of ad-free niceness – which is the equivalent of 100+ pages of most magazines. Small pages, mind. Please buy direct from us at www.woofahmag.com. We make a lot more money that way and we have to sell a few hundred to be able to do the next one! HUGE thanks to everyone who made it possible, especially droid for spending three months designing it and John Eden for spending even longer organising it, but also the brilliant band of writers, photographers and illustrators who have been so generous with their talent. It’s a rush.

Now on to issue three… soon come and already PACKED with great interviews!