Title: Riders (2024)
Duration: 6’30
Format: Stereo Fixed Media
In 2023, Thought Universe studio was commissioned to create a traditional dub version of The Doors song Riders on the Storm, sung by the Jamaican singer/songwriter Horace Andy. An artist with a distinctive singing style, mixing melodic phrases with extended techniques, he is known as long term collaborator with the UK band Massive Attack. His singing style often imitates the sound of electronic studio instruments used in original production of dub reggae music.
In Riders (2024) the dub aesthetic is expanded further by abstracting and transforming the original vocal recording. A series’s of sonic transformation processes were carried out on the original sound recording. Firstly, retrograding the sound material using analogue technologies. For example, tape echo, phasers, analogue mixers and low-cost reverb units enhance the musical nuisances contained in the vocal recording. Finally, the resulting sounds were edited into fragments and compiled in a way, altering the original meaning of the lyrical content. Eventually, a process of emergence occurred, a reducibility of objects to the sum total of their material components became the mode of production. The physical reduction of the sound material and re-ordering of grains altered the semiotic meaning. Spatially abstracting the semiotic chain, through the dynamism of sound, an ever changing propagation with infinite physical and sensorial possibilities.
In many respects, the sonic processes of dub music share many similarities to electroacoustic music, both rely on the creation of a circuit, forming an integral part of the compositional process.
In the 1970’s, custom-built studios appeared in Jamaica. Music producers customised hi-fi and lo-fi electronics technologies that began to define the dub aesthetic. The lack of resources, due to poor economic growth, gave rise to DIY sound system culture. The economical deprivative provided an exciting platform for inventive and explorative studio creativity. Many of the studio techniques were discovered through a series of ‘happy accidents’, and have had a large impact on music production and electronic instrument design today. The appeal of dub music is its playfulness and discovery of working with organized sound in the studio, and is now a global phenomena.
Thought Universe EMS studio is an independent artistic research studio for electronic music in Manchester.
Copyright © Dr. Mark Pilkington 2024.