The psychology of dub music.

This article is also available on my Patreon page, the layout is much nicer there and the cheapest tier to get access to full articles and all songs is $3 (Substack wont let me go lower than $5).

I make music, lots of it. Some of it you may have heard in the KIRAC films. On this substack you will get a behind the scenes of every single thing I make. Whether it's for KIRAC films or my own musical projects. I will publish a weekly musical blog such as this one. I will also do occasional live streams (probably on patreon) of various music production and other illegal activities. This is my first post.

Lee Scratch Perry is the father of Dub. He made a lot of music and most of it is bad. It’s unfocused and lazy. But Woman’s dub of the album Revolution Dub is an amazing song. The way his voice sounds when he says “I had a love, a true love, an’ I lost her” (around 0:39), a pathos that momentarily takes form, and then before you know it fizzles out again. Back into obscurity, back into the swamp of the dub world. The melody it uses is completely apathetic to the pathos of the singer. It’s what it feels like to be in the Netherlands working on KIRAC films. And the moment they come out.

Dub is not happy music, it’s not peace and love music, it’s not esoteric rastafari music, although sometimes it can be that. But good dub is music for sociopaths. It’s a world full of unsettled emotions. Things don’t necessarily fall in the emotional category where you expect them to. There is a looming aggression that can explode at any moment. Dub makes me feel like I’m on the edge. That sweet, sweet moment right before you decide to throw a plate against the wall. The calm dedication that sets over you once you decide that you are going to solve your anger by sublimating it into a plate spatting out in a thousand pieces against a wall. The delicacy of taking a large amount of psychedelics and bordering on schizophrenia. You have to use all your power in your brain to not go insane. You know if you let go for one second you will slip into a world that you might not come out of. There’s an adrenaline that comes with this borderline rope walking and it’s perfectly captured by the music of Dub. I absolutely love Dub.

I made quite a few dub songs over the last few weeks. This is a new love of mine, so I’m relatively new to listening to dub, and anything I listen to I instantly replicate in my own way. The character suits me very well. The sociopathy, the underlying aggression beneath the polite words. It fits me. And I do think it also can fit a lot of the KIRAC movies. So I explored it for quite a bit. And here are some of the results. I used a lot of Lee Scratch Perry’s mixing techniques that include feedbacking multiple channels into each other, and of course the classic spring reverb, tape delay and all that.

Let me know what you think. Some of these songs will probably end up in the new KIRAC film, which is going to a banger, and some of it will end up on an album as full and completely finished songs. Some of them are done, some of them aren’t. But I won’t tell you which is which, because I want to know what you think.

This is called: I feel for the man

Cover image is Tommy Robinson, a leading figure in the anti immigration movement in the UK

Vlinder Dub (Butterfly Dub)

The cover image is one of the earliest known depictions of a butterfly. According to ChatGPT there are a few possible earlier candidates, such as prehistoric cave art, these are not so clear to me. It comes from the tomb of

Nebamun, a relatively minor bureaucrat, whose tomb paintings is one of the most amazing and well-preserved works of ancient Egyptian art, it gives me the same light happy feeling as a good champagne or this song. I’ll include a larger image of the cover below the song.