MUSIC
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Hopeton Brown, better known as Scientist, has been a pioneering figure in the world of dub for 40 years. His early love of electronics proved fruitful when (still a teenager) he was hired at King Tubby's studio in Kingston. Brown quickly ascended the ranks and became heir to Tubby's throne, producing imaginative and technically impressive mixes that solidified his forward-looking nickname.
Originally released in 1981, In The Kingdom Of Dub remains one of the best early LPs in Scientist's long career. Produced by Roy Cousins at Channel One and featuring Sly & Robbie along with members of The Revolutionaries, The Aggrovators and The Soul Syndicate, the album offers a wide range of arresting rhythms, bold effect drops and exquisitely melodic bass. From "18 Drumalie Avenue Dub" (a reference to King Tubby's address) to "Burning Sun Dub," Scientist lays down a veritable roadmap of dub – filled with disintegrating echoes of satiny organ and textural guitar – firmly cementing his place as one of the true innovators in Jamaican popular music.
Carlos Aguirre Grupo's third album released in 2008, known as “Violator (purple disc),” is now available on vinyl.
Carlos Aguirre, together with his trusted colleagues, strived to reach the heights of expression in terms of both music and ensemble, and this album is a masterpiece of highly refined sound world beyond the framework of contemporary neo-folklore. This work has influenced many artists in Japan and abroad, and even now, every time you listen to it, you will encounter fresh surprises and discoveries.
Japanese Edition with Obi. More pop, softer...
The sound design is made with a warm sound image in the background.
This is a turning point work that shows a new frontier.
Japanese Edition with Obi. A gem of a record with mature songwriting talent and production work by John McEntire and Jim O'Rourke!
Herman Chin Loy wants the world to know the truth about his musical vision, realized in a series of fantastic records released throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s. And how his mission was interrupted in the early 1990s.
“I would like to start off by saying: what about the half that has never been told, who so bold, for the price of gold. The first part is like a Jamaican proverb, but who so bold, for the price of gold, is the part that I put in, because it is all about gold. My mission on this earth is all about the music. But if you want to know the truth, follow the money!”
Herman’s musical trip had a wonderfully sunny start, before ending in acrimony and intrigue. Follow the money indeed… He started by selling records for Leslie Kong, then opened his own One Stop record shop, before moving on to KG’s electrical appliance store in Halfway Tree and deejaying at their discoteque, the Lotus A Go Go.
“It was the age of Aquarius! Whatever was in the air, or what got my attention at the time would find its way into the music, cos I was very creative.”
So Herman turned his keen ears towards record production. The Aquarius and Scorpio labels had a fine run of hit tunes, known for their unusual arrangements and imaginative productions. Many cuts featured Herman himself talking over them. Others were moody instrumentals, for which Herman invented the name Augustus Pablo.
“The name came out of my head. Augustus Pablo – it sounded real not normal! Horace Swaby is the one that I really put the name with, but before that it was Lloyd Charmers, he did some songs for me under that name. Well Horace Swaby came back to me and said can I use the name on my own productions, and I said sure, go ahead. Cos I was not interested in money per se, I was interested in helping others along.”
Kingston in the early 70s was on fire with new music, and Herman put on the afterburners to release Aquarius Dub, probably the world’s first dub LP.
“People always used to come to the store and they want to buy the dub music, but they couldn’t get it easily, so I said let me put all these things together as an LP, and let’s put no label on it so it looks like a dub [plate], and let’s sell it as a dub album. And I was the first one to do that, for sure. I remember when I took the record down to sell it to Randy’s, well they just scoff at it to some degree. Well if people didn’t want to sell my music, then I would just say ‘fuck off with you’, I’ll just sell my music myself, from my own shop and nowhere else.”
Herman then opened the Aquarius Records shop on Constant Spring Road, with a busy bus stop right outside providing a captive audience. Big speakers were placed out in the street, and Herman acted as a vibes man and entertainer, running in and out of the shop and dragging customers inside. As the crowds grew bigger, Aquarius became extremely influential, and the energetic Herman could make or break the latest tunes.
“Well once we get going now, the Aquarius record shop sells more records than anyone in Jamaica. And the people get to know me and come to hang out to see what we play. And soon all musicians start gathering there, like Tommy McCook and the Wailers and everyone, cos Aquarius was the place to be.”
In one infamous incident, Peter Tosh was hanging around outside the shop, when plain-clothes police grabbed the spliff he was smoking and dragged him back to Halfway Tree police station, where he was brutally beaten. Herman and Tommy McCook were the ones who bailed him out.
“Peter Tosh was feisty and got in some trouble sometimes, but then we all did – heheheh. I had always hung around with the bad boys.”
Herman had by now brought his brother Lloyd into the business, and together they opened the Aquarius Studio, fitted out to an extremely high standard by Rosser Electronics, from Swansea in Wales. The studio is probably most remembered today for the recordings made there by Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh. But it was also the seedbed for some interesting offshoots into jazz and soul, with Herman always pushing up against the boundaries of what was conventional. Interestingly, Herman retains a huge affection for Lee “Scratch” Perry, and the mystic experiments that came out of his Black Ark studio.
“Well Scratch was a mad guy, a crazy dude. When we were a youth, the two of us make some records with a bit of screaming and shouting on top. So I come with “here is the news, the great bugga wugga from arugga”, and some other foolishness, just like Scratch, who come with the Chicken Scratch. It was a youthman thing. Then later he came into the shop one day looking like Haile Selassie. And I say “bloodclaat Scratch, you can’t go around looking so”, and he take off him cap and looked inside and pull out some cigarette butt he found in there. And he had a girlfriend name Pauline, and when the two of them fall out, he threw everything out of the studio that had the letter P on it! He was one crazy dude.”
Herman was developing his own unique world view derived partly from a rejection of conventional politics, alongside a distinctive reading of the Bible.
“Musicism is because you have socialism, communism and capitalism, so I thought Musicism would be a good thing to forge people together, to stop them yelling at each other and murdering each other. I thought it would be a good place for everybody to come together. Then I started a little thing down by Trenchtown there, where I was getting people from Rema and from Jungle to get together, but it mashed up in a little while because in the heat of the moment the guns would bark, and for the sake of my life I opted out of that, you know. But Musicism was a thought, so I continued to have an album called Musicism, and you’re talking about people like Linval Thompson, Sugar Minott. I was saying to the people of Jamaica, let’s not vote JLP, let’s not vote PNP, let it be that Musicism is a place where it’s not politics, and where people can talk to each other, so Musicism was birthed out of that.. So we had all sorts of things going on with the Musicism label, and I would put an album with the vocal and then have another album with the dub, because I was into business, I was into making money, but what drives me into the music was the music itself, because I really love the music.”
This reissue is of two extremely rare LPs that came out on Musicism in 1983, a couple of years after dub had declined in popularity as an album form in Jamaica. They were released in the generic 12-inch sleeves of the American label TK Disco, which had recently ceased trading, picked up on Herman’s travels to Miami. The labels were either blank or stamped with the wrong song titles from a similarly obscure vocal compilation. A handful of copies were exported to London and the U.S., and the remainder were sold exclusively by the Aquarius shop.
“In the studio we used to work really fast in them days, especially with Karl Pitterson. Karl Pitterson was one of the most efficient engineers you would ever find, and him and me had a great understanding. So the studio ran real fast. Then there was this guy Steven Stanley who was just a little youngster when he start with me, but he went on to Compass Point and working with Chris Blackwell. He was a little uppity, a bit prideful, although he didn’t even recognise that, but still he was a really good engineer. So we had these people to work for me, and it didn’t take long to do what I did. So it’s strange that we did these things so fast, so many years ago, and they still have a public that wants to hear them today.”
Herman also had an eccentric label called Selection Exclusive which mainly released 12 inch singles with hand-stamped titles on the labels, or sometimes no title at all, wrapped in more of those generic TK Disco sleeves. If this wasn’t enough to throw off even the most serious collector, instead of the expected version on the B-side, there would often be a totally different tune from 10 years earlier, sometimes with Herman whispering smokey rhymes over the top.
“Selection Exclusive was birthed where I was selling this dub album exclusive, but it was expensive. So I don’t think much people knew about these records, but the collectors knew, and these records were selling for hundreds of [Jamaican] dollars more than a normal LP. So this dub album come out and I give it to the sound systems, I give it to Gemini and Merritone, so that they play it all the time. I never give my records to the radio station. And I made so much money out of this album, that it was exclusive expensive!”
Finally, it was a family dispute with Herman’s brother Lloyd that derailed the Aquarius and Musicism train. The outcome was that Lloyd took the studio and Herman kept the record shop.
“I go to court twice and lost all of that money, and my brother won control of the studio. But then they try to write me out of history. And I get so upset when I really think about it. I’m not saying I’ve never done anything wrong in my life. We all need to repent. You see, I have to tell the truth: what about the half that’s never been told! But there was some skulduggery going on then.”
Nowadays there are no record shops on Constant Spring Road. The block which housed Aquarius is now home to Usain Bolt’s Tracks And Records restaurant. Herman joined the steady exodus of Jamaicans to Miami, and today finds him using his verbal dexterity and irrepressible energy to sell Sorrel drinks filled with medicinal herbs, ginger and turmeric. But his music is still out there, circling the globe through speakers and headphones...
“I always want my music to be on a higher plane, like to carry some message. And a dub album gives plenty of space for the message. Just because there are no words, it doesn’t mean that it don’t communicate. If you listen carefully, you will hear it properly, and so the message will reach down through the years, and spread to the people again. This is a spiritual conversation, cos I have reached to a different spiritual plane!”
Diggory Kenrick
On August 5th 1962, after 300 years of British rule, which had soaked the earth of the island in blood, Jamaica was finally independent. The country that the British left behind was certainly a place of widespread poverty and deep inequality, but there seems to have been a real burst of confidence that came with independence.
Newsreels of the day show well-dressed crowds reacting with enthusiasm and excitement, and the era found its perfect soundtrack in the boldness and exuberance of ska music, which was erupting all over the island.
This optimistic mood found probably its greatest artistic expression in the music of the Skatalites, who formed in June 1964 as a kind of Jamaican supergroup. Philip “Justin” Yap was a young, upcoming producer who had used members of the Skatalites for his first tunes, recorded either at RJR (Radio Jamaica and Redifussion) or at Federal studios. As Steve Barrow documented in the sleevenotes for Pressure Sounds’ reissue of the classic “Ska-Boo-Da-Ba” album, Justin had also befriended Clement “Coxsone” Dodd, and when Coxsone opened his own Studio One facility in December 1963, Justin immediately switched most of his production work to this new recording room. Studio One opened just in time to catch the formation of the Skatalites, and is where Justin recorded most of his classic Skatalites sides.
He also recorded lots of excellent instrumentals with a smaller brass section, still mainly using members of the Skatalites, but crediting instead the composer or arranger of the tune. Combined with Coxsone’s own recordings, these productions for Justin’s Top Deck and Tuneico labels really captured the members of the Skatalites at their magnificent best, in the unique atmosphere of Studio One.
From 2006, I had the huge pleasure of getting to know the great Jamaican
innovator Hedley Jones, who told me how he had designed and installed the original Studio One recording studio, responsible for most of the recordings on
this disc: ‘In 1963 (Coxsone) Dodd contacted me. I was doing a lot of recording work with him as a guitarist in 1961, ‘62 and ‘63, and in 1963 Dodd contacted me with the idea of building a studio of his own. The only equipment he could find himself was a record cutting head that he got from a pawn shop in Miami, but it was a 60 cycle machine. He brought that to Jamaica, and an Ampex reel to reel one track recorder – they was the only things he could find. The rest of the stuff is history because I had to design all the amplifiers, design the studio layout and everything, with the help of two of my sons, who did quite a bit of the laying of
the conduits, while I designed the amplifiers.’ Hedley Jones was an amazing polymath, and one of Jamaica’s greatest inventors.
He designed and built one of the world’s first solid body electric guitars, one of the world’s first double necked guitars, and a new traffic light system for the city of Kingston, all based on the knowledge he gained during World War 2, as a radar operator with the RAF. He called himself “an experimenter”: ‘So I built that studio for him between August and December of 1963. I built the mixing board myself – well I had to – everything in Coxsone’s studio was custom built by me, anything that had to do with amplification. As a matter of fact, I had to design circuits that would quiet his cooling equipment, his air conditioning, it was too noisy. I had a board in there that automatically switched off the air conditioning as soon as the recording started. As soon as you turn on the warning
light, saying that you’re starting recording, the cooling equipment switch off automatically. And all that was my design.
‘It was open in December, I think the week before Christmas. And after having a successful opening – I put together a band to test it – and after the first successful test, then of course the rest is history. I think the board I built for Coxsone had 4 or 5 inputs for microphones, but it was still only a single channel (tape) recorder.
One input (on the board) was for the band, one for the singer, and there was a central microphone hanging from the ceiling… so at least four or five input channels that were available on the console. Anything that you can think of in a modern studio was there. We had reverb – I built that and I used a circuit and I used a mechanical unit, a spring reverb, and then we amplify that and fed it into the circuits. Tape echo came later. That spring reverb for Coxsone was the only one I (ever) built.
‘The last thing I had to do with launching that studio was helping in the recording of Bob Marley’s recording “It Hurts To Be Alone”, that was done on a Sunday morning in April of 64, and Ernie Ranglin was the guitarist, and he used my double-necked guitar, which was also a first in the world.’
Other than building the first incarnation of Studio One, probably Hedley’s greatest historical impact came from the design and build of the Jones Sound 100 Watt tube amplifier of 1947, which powered the first recognisable Jamaican sound system for Tommy Wong, aka Tom the Great Sebastian, with the same amplifier driving the first systems for Duke Reid the Trojan, Clement “Coxsone” Dodd and Roy Johnston’s “House of Joy”.
‘I build the first sound, but I didn’t call it ‘sound system’… it’s Tommy Wong who call it sound system, he gave it the name. It was 100 watts amplifier, and I build one for Duke Reid and one for Coxsone, and it was a basic design but with those tubes you couldn’t exceed 100 watts or you’d be running into trouble. ‘I wasn’t interested in copyright or money at the time. All I was interested in was the technology. I had these ideas in my head and on paper that I wanted put out as a practical design. So that’s where I started the ball rolling, it was in design.
Anyway, I left Kingston in 1965 because I found that I was working for nothing. I was doing all this and getting no rewards. And everybody was like “oh Mr Jones, could you just do this” or “just do that”, so I left Kingston in January 65 feeling quite dejected, I picked up all my things and came to Montego Bay.’
So Hedley Jones had an epiphany, and left the competitive bustle of Kingston for the relative peace of Montego Bay. Of course, he carried on experimenting, building great telescopes whilst working as a journalist, schoolteacher and guitarist, and as president of the Jamaica Federation of Musicians. When I got to know him, he was turning 90 and finally getting some recognition from the Jamaican establishment, receiving the Order of Distinction from the government, and some favourable profiles in the newspapers.
Through Hedley, I also got to talk to Keith ‘Sticky’ Parke, who engineered many classic recordings, first at RJR, and later at Coxsone’s new Studio One facility. With Justin Yapp supplying food, drink and ganja, and also paying everyone double, a convivial and exuberant atmosphere certainly comes through in the recordings, many of which were captured by Sticky Parke: ‘I worked for RJR from 1958 to 1966. At RJR we had a big concert studio, and people would hire the hall, like producers like Chin Randy’s, and I did a nice job for Chin Randy’s with “Rico’s Special”, I recorded that at RJR. I’d say I got involved with Dodd in 1959 or 1960. I think I might have been the first engineer to do any recordings there. Hedley Jones, he built the studio. I worked at Studio One from when it was built, and I recorded the Skatalites and Bob Marley, all the great names I recorded there. I was still at RJR but I used to go down there after work
or when I have spare time to fit in Coxsone’s studio. I worked there until ‘66.’ Sticky remembered the technical side of recording the Skatalites at Studio One: ‘We had, let me see, we had piano, drums, bass, one for the horns and two tenors (saxes), we had about five or six mics. For the drums we used a big RCA44 BX (microphone) or something like that, and we used Neumann mics also. We’re going back 50 odd years and you’re picking my brain! When we started at Coxsone, he only had an Ampex 350 and another Ampex, but they were all single (mono) track. Coxsone started with the one track machine, so if somebody in the band made an error we had to record it all over again, it was not like today where
you could dub that back in. What we used to do was Coxsone also had a sound system, about 3 sound system in Jamaica at the time, so what we’d do is we’d record and we’d have several reels of many, many records, and on Saturday afternoon we’d transfer the tapes onto acetate disc, what we called soft wax (or dubplate), and then he would send them out to different sound systems, and sell some of them.’
Sticky remembered supplying the Skatalites with American jazz albums for
inspiration: ‘Most of the tunes the Skatalites played, it’s not their original. Most of it came from (for instance) Herbie Hancock music which, working at the radio station, I would borrow the record, tape it and take the tape down there (to Studio One). There’s a chap, but now he’s dead, God bless him, but one of the finest musicians we ever produced named Jackie Mittoo, and I would marvel, cos while I would play the tape from the control room down to him, he would be writing out the music and playing along. And then when the Skatalites get together they would make their
own arrangement of it. Jackie Mittoo was a dear friend of mine, but then all of those musicians was my friends, you know.’ Sticky described the relaxed arrangements for payment: ‘Well I never charged Coxsone a dime, but I was well taken care of. Like we had no set fee, like 5 pound a session or something, but he was quite generous to me.
And I never charge him but he was quite generous to me, he provided all the alcohol for my wedding and also the champagne, and I never had to ask him, like I liked to play the horses and he’d always stand me a couple of pounds so I never could complain.’
This earliest incarnation of the Studio One setup would have been used on mostof the tracks on this ‘Ska Shots’ compilation, but it was significantly rebuilt in 1965, probably just after the Skatalites split up. Hedley’s mixing board was replaced, along with the one track Ampex recorders, swapped for two track machines which allowed the overdubbing of extra tracks, so a vocal could be recorded after the backing track. Unlike Sticky, Hedley Jones was not entirely happy with his payments from Coxsone:
‘I don’t know what happened to that console, because he changed it for a
commercial console about two years after, when he had made enough money that he could buy commercial stuff – he didn’t even finish paying me for the original console. He still owes me some money and so I hope that when we meet in hell, he’ll pay me then!’
I lost contact with Keith “Sticky” Parke, who was living in New York in the early 2000s, but Hedley Jones stayed in touch. He died aged 99, but, until he was overtaken with blindness, he would still email me regularly with questions about the latest recording software, and advice for what he called “good daddying”, on how I should bring up my children as a new father. Reading the words of both of them today brings back a key moment in Jamaican cultural history, when the birth of the Studio One recording studio coincided with the formation of the mighty Skatalites.
Diggory Kenrick
Black 12" vinyl in printed inner sleeve in 3mm outer sleeve
Early electronic music composer Raymond Scott will have a treasure trove of essential and extremely rare recordings collected on this new release Three Willow Park: Electronic Music from Inner Space, 1961-1971. From having his music adapted for Warner Bros. cartoons to inventing early electronic music instruments to releasing the classic (and recently reissued) Soothing Sounds For Baby series, Scott’s electronic music was famously ahead of its time and touched on sounds like techno and ambient music decades before those terms even existed. Many of the tracks feature Scott’s own inventions such as the Electronium and Clavivox instruments and capture a musician unimaginably ahead of his time.
Three Willow Park: Electronic Music from Inner Space, 1961–1971, represents the second anthology of pioneering electronica by Raymond Scott. The album contains 61 previously unissued gems, many featuring hypnotic rhythm tracks played by Scott’s Electronium — an invention which composed and performed using programmed intelligence. Three Willow Park reveals that Scott was producing beat-oriented proto-techno before the 1970s explosion of electronic music and rhythms on the pop charts, a significant achievement that should not be overlooked.
In 2000, Basta issued Manhattan Research Inc., a 2-cd set of 69 tracks recorded 1953–69, spotlighting Scott’s groundbreaking electronica — a gallery of strange sounds seemingly beamed down from UFOs. MRI also presented some of the earliest TV & radio commercials to feature electronic music, as well as early film soundtrack collaborations with Jim Henson. Three Willow Park presents the next stage in assuring Scott’s place in electronic music history.
Willow Park Center was an industrial rental complex of offices and warehouses in a Long Island suburb. Following his 1965 marital breakup, Scott set up shop at WPC. He operated a musical lab — researching, experimenting, testing, and measuring. He twirled knobs, flipped switches, and took notes. He installed equipment and machines, and used them to build new equipment and machines. This makeshift compound remained Scott’s workspace and bedroom until 1971, when he decamped for L.A. to work for Berry Gordy at Motown.
Scott was a highly qualified engineer who also happened to be a conservatory-trained (Juilliard) musician. He could compose, arrange, perform, improvise and edit, but given a shelf of hardware and a soldering iron, he could also rig an appliance to further his musical aims. Like many visionaries, Scott foreshadowed the future. He developed technological processes which were pivotal in the evolution of the fax machine. He composed a “silent” piece years before John Cage‘s 4′ 33″. He predicted (in 1944) that composers would someday reach audiences via thought transference. He applied for and was awarded numerous patents. Foremost, he developed electronic and automated sound-generating technology to craft the elements of pop music at a time when circuit-made sound was largely a novelty, used in “serious” works, or cranked-up for special effects in science fiction films.
In 1946, while still leading jazz bands, Scott established Manhattan Research, Inc., billed as “Designers and Manufacturers of Electronic Music and Musique Concrète Devices and Systems.” By the 1950s, he was using his inventions to produce commercials with electronic soundtracks, as well as developing automated sequencer technology. His friend and colleague Bob Moog said, “Scott was definitely in the forefront of developing electronic music technology and using it commercially as a musician.”
Besides the Electronium, sounds heard on Three Willow Park were generated by the Circle Machine; Clavivox; Bass-Line Generator; Bandito the Bongo Artist (a drum machine); tone, melody, rhythm and sound effects generators (some controlled, others random); oscillators, sequencers, and modulators; tape montages; and acoustic instruments and voices. These recordings, like those on MRI, define and establish Scott’s legacy in electronic music history.
So excited and honored to finally release the vinyl document of my realization of JOHN CAGE’s ROZART MIX. Back in the extremely strange year of 2020, I was approached by Wave Farm and John Cage Trust to stage a performance of this seldomly performed piece that Cage wrote for Alvin Lucier. The piece is comprised of 88 tape loops (one for each key of a piano), spliced together with multiple non-musical sounds played back on 12 reel to reel machines.
In January of 2021 I spent a wonderful and intense week researching ROZART MIX at John Cage Trust at Bard College. It was the first place I had visited during the pandemic. On October 23, 2021, with the assistance of Rose Actor-Engel, Twig Harper, C. Lavender, Quintron, Robert Turman, and John Wiese, I presented a 6 hour performance of ROZART MIX at John Cage Trust. Six hours of 12 individually amplified reel to reel tape machines, placed around multiple floors of a house, playing 88 tape loops spliced together by 5 to 175 splices, created an overwhelming and joyous environment of cacophonous sound. The performance culminated with John Wiese touching a frog for the first time as the final sound croaked through the speakers. The frog contact was just one of many magical moments that occurred during the preparation and presentation of the piece. I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as we enjoyed performing it. Special thanks to Galen Joseph-Hunter of Wave Farm and Laura Kuhn & Emy Martin of John Cage Trust for trusting me with this material.
Death Is Not The End's 333 series is back with another dig into the catalogue of the NYC-based Flames label on this reissue of a highly coveted Revolutionaries LP, Meditation in Dub.
One of reggae music's most famed session bands, The Revolutionaries were an often r/evolving cast of some of the finest session musicians on the island during the roots and early dancehall periods of the mid/late 1970s and early 1980s. These would include Earl 'Wire' Lindo, Radcliffe 'Dougie' Bryan, Ansell Collins, Bobby Kalphat, Lloyd Parks, Uziah 'Sticky' Thompson, Bongo Herman, Stanley Bryan, Bo Peep, Eric 'Bingy Bunny' Lamont, Errol 'Tarzan' Nelson, Skully Simms, Robbie Lyn, Mikey 'Mao' Chung amongst many others. The enduring core of the group, however, was undoubtedly in the coming together of the legendary rhythm section of drummer Sly Dunbar and bassist Robbie Shakespeare - with the formation of The Revolutionaries marking the first time that this often unparalleled duo worked together.
The group laid down these rhythm tracks at their base at the storied Channel One recording studio, Maxfield Avenue, Kingston sometime in the mid 1970s - under the arrangement of one of reggae music's great undersung figures, Ossie Hibbert. Early in 1975 Ossie was to move to Maxfield Avenue just as Jo Jo & Ernest Hookim's studio was starting up. A well-respected session musician himself through the late 1960s and early 70s (he played keys for Bunny 'Striker' Lee and Keith Hudson and would also form part of another foundational session band, The Soul Syndicate) he was initially summoned by Jo Jo to be a band member for The Revolutationaries but quickly assumed the role of producer, engineer and talent scout for the studio, responsible for selecting the artists to bring into the studio.
These tracks were recorded by Hibbert around this time for Winston Jones, the original singer and composer of Stop That Train (later made world-famous by Keith & Tex's version) with his Spanishtonians for Prince Buster's label in the early 1960s. Jones had moved from JA to NYC in the early 1970s where he established and ran the Flames label. The imprint would go on to form a core part of Brooklyn's reggae scene from the mid-1970s until the early 1990s, though Jones often employed the use of Channel One, Hibbert and The Revolutionaries back home in the recording of rhythm tracks for his productions. Thus the Meditation in Dub LP is essentially formed of stellar dub versions to many of the early Flames labels 45s, produced and released by Jones throughout the mid to late 1970s, including crucial takes on a great many popular rhythms of that period. One of any self-respecting dub LP collectors' holy grails, with originals going for up to £400, it is issued here under license from the now Texas-based Jones with the kind assistance of RB at DKR in sourcing the audio for this new cut.
On the rare occasions that Ultramarine’s story is told, the duo’s fifth album, 1998’s A User’s Guide, tends to get omitted from the narrative. Radically different to anything the duo released before or since, it has remained a slept-on, timeless and inherently futurist classic ever since.
Unavailable on vinyl since the year it was released – in part because the label it originally came out on, New Electronica, folded shortly afterwards – A User’s Guide was the result of a conscious decision by Ultramarine members Paul Hammond and Ian Cooper to change their working methods and the “sound palette” that underpinned their work.
Out went the partially improvised hybrid electronic/acoustic sounds and the collaborations with guest musicians they’d become famous for. They were replaced by painstakingly created electronic sounds and textures, metallic motifs, spaced-out chords, rhythms rooted in contemporary techno and drum & bass culture, and nods aplenty to pioneering music of the period, from the post-rock atmospherics of Tortoise, and the hazy dub techno of Basic Channel, to the tech-jazz of Detroit, the minimalism of Berlin, and the musically expansive warmth of Chicago deep house.
It may have taken a year to create – part of which was spent developing this head-spinning new sound – but the results were undeniably unearthly and effortlessly forward-thinking. Over a quarter of a century may have passed since it first appeared in record stores, but A User’s Guide still sounds fresh and modern – a remarkable achievement given the relatively sparse and basic equipment used in the making of the album.
As this first vinyl reissue conclusively proves, the material showcased on A User’s Guide has lost none of its sparkle in the 26 years that have passed since its release. For proof, check the head-nodding IDM bubbliness of opener ‘All of a Sudden’, the queasy, lopsided tech-jazz of ‘Sucker For You’, the locked-in beats and mind-mangling motifs of ‘Zombie’, the ghostly, out-there electro of ‘Ambush’, the Autechre-esque ‘Ghost Routine’ and the triumphant closing cut ‘What Machines Want’, a classic of minimalistic, jazz-flecked techno futurism.
Fully remastered from the original DATs by Jason G at Transition Studios, the 2024 vinyl edition of A User’s Guide thrusts Ultramarine’s most overlooked album back into the spotlight. This WRWTFWW edition also features brand new contextualising sleeve notes, complete with new quotes on the production process from Ultramarine, by dance music historian Matt Anniss (author of Join The Future: Bleep Techno and the Birth of British Bass Music, and founder of online electronic music platform Jointhefuture.net ). <iframe style="border: 0; width: 350px; height: 472px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=1271662071/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=333333/artwork=none/transparent=true/" seamless><a href="https://wrwtfww.com/album/a-users-guide">A User's Guide by Ultramarine</a></iframe>
The only studio album by Madvillain (MF DOOM & Madlib) – widely regarded as one of the best hip-hop albums of all time.
“Inexhaustibly brilliant, with layer-upon-layer of carefully considered yet immediate hip- hop, forward-thinking but always close to its roots.” - Pitchfork
This new version includes upgraded packaging combined with audiophile sound quality for the ultimate listening experience.
Composer Ahmed Essyad was born in Salé, Morocco, in 1938. After studying music at the Rabat Conservatoire (Morocco) he moved to Paris in 1962, where he became a student of Max Deutsch and, later, his assistant. Trained in the avant-garde practices of Western musical composition, he also claimed the Amazigh folk music of Morocco as a fundamental source of inspiration for his work.
In 1965, he was already incorporating elements of oral tradition in his work so as to question the language of his time, and therefore had to cope with the limits of musical notation and communication with musicians who did not share his cultural references. It was difficult
to agree on what was implicit, 'behind the notes,' especially regarding the management of musical time and micro-intervals. In search of new compositional tools, he turned to electro-acoustic music. Working in a studio made it possible for him to be the interpreter of his own work, which ensured a certain continuity with music of oral tradition. The pieces presented here were produced between 1972 and 1974 in a studio dedicated to electro-acoustic music, the S.M.E.C.A, which was part of the Music Workshop founded by Jorge Arriagada in Paris. The studio was equipped with EMS and Minimoog synthesizers, a piano, a marimba, a xylophone, as well as various percussion instruments and a tape delay system.
The practice of electro-acoustics may have been a mere parenthesis in Ahmed Essyad's long and prolific career as a composer of contemporary music, but the works presented here are nonetheless important. They show how strongly he both supported North African popular forms of expression and opposed its folklorizing through simplistic and 'exotic' representations. It's not about fusing together East and West - impossible, he says: "the real point is to open up an imaginary space where another modernity can exist outside the largely Eurocentric framework of avant-garde music. Synthesis means anticipation, knowledge. As for me, I'm increasingly ignorant. I write to discover what I don't know. Music feeds me, it pollinates me. It's my daily wine."
LA が生んだレジェンド:MADLIB、永遠にしてもはや幻のプロジェクト:Quasimoto 名義でリリースした2013年のアルバム”YESSIR WHATEVER”が、新たなシルバー・フォイル(銀箔)エディションで限定枚数のLPリリースが決定。メタリック・カラー盤＋ジャケットのQuasimotoのイラストもオリジナル盤同様にステッカー仕様となっております。
ヒップホップからジャズ、ソウル、ワールド、ビートシーンまであらゆるシーンがその動向をチェックしている LA が生んだ真の鬼才 / 最重要プロデューサー:Madlib の別名義プロジェクトが Quasimoto。ソウル、ジャズ、ファンク、ディスコからレゲエ、ワールド、ライブラリー、、膨大なレコードコレ クションから奇想天外なサンプリングソースを大胆に活かして直感的に作られたMadlibのトラックが次々に展開、そこにQuasimotoと Madlib自身が絶妙のコンビネーションでスピーディーにラップを繰り広げる様はまさに圧巻!Madlibのワンアンドオンリーの世界観が生み出すこの極めつけのフィーリングは聴けば聴くほどにハマる! サンプリングによるストレートなヒップホップが持つ無限の可能性を改めて感じさせてくれる。更にマッドな世界観をいっそう際立たせるLAを代表するアーティスト:Jeff JankによるQuasimotoキャラクターのイラストも最高です。
Jeff Jank, designer of the original album and “Gold Chains” edition:
The first time I heard The Further Adventures of Lord Quas, it struck me as a hip-hop equivalent of Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention’s We’re Only in It for the Money (1968). Zappa’s crazy, chaotic record also happened to feature the first-ever knock-off cover of The Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a tradition in graphic arts that continues to this day. The ‘Gold Chains’ collage is my own spin on the tradition, also taking its inspiration from Madlib’s track “Rappcats Pt. 3.”
This alternate cover for Further Adventures was designed Fall 2020. In just a year between then and now we lost three of the heroes in the collage: DOOM, Biz Markie, and Melvin Van Peebles.
Gabriel da Rosa signed to Stones Throw Records in 2022 after moving to LA from Brazil to start a new life. He met Stones Throw’s founder Peanut Butter Wolf and the two bonded over their shared love for Brazil, bossa nova, and records.
Since then Gabriel has connected with all types of musicians in LA, including Pedro Dom, who's worked with some of Brazil's best internationally known artists (Seu Jorge, Rodrigo Amarante and Latin Grammy Award winner Ian Ramil).
- Gabriel travelled around the world before landing in L.A. where he met Peanut Butter Wolf. The two bonded over their shared love for Brazilian music, and this led Gabriel to start writing more songs inspired by his heritage.
- É o que a casa oferece is Gabriel’s debut album on Stones Throw. It pays homage to his Brazilian roots, but also brings a contemporary edge to the music Gabriel grew up listening to.
For fans of Arthur Verocai, Azymuth, Rodrigo Maranhão, Domenique Dumont, Stan Getz & João Gilberto.
