Scientific Dub - The Scientist (1981)

The original point of dub music, and its original appeal, was that it was creating other worlds from already existing signal processing. In the world of pre-digital effects, dub producers had to go to great lengths to morph the sound of the records into something that sounded like it was from Mars.

There’s no mystery to this in the modern era. You can use a thousand dsp plugins to do what you like. You can loop your board through thousands of hardware effects options. You can use Ableton Live to build layers of bass and reverb in real time.

This record is right on the seam between traditional and modern dub. It incorporates more modern ideas of putting bits and pieces together in altered and unique ways, building a soundscape that’s more than just a collage.

At the same time, the tech of the time limit it to being firmly inside the voabulary that was already there.