Heavy Metal Dub - The Scientist (1982)

I dig dub music, especially the old school Jamaican ancestors of modern dub. To me, it has a sheen of romance, like watching old movies or seeing the Apollo moon landings again. It’s of its time, and feels primitive and low-tech. But at the same time, we’ll never quite get back that sense of novelty, the absolute adventurousness that’s impossible now that you can download a plug-in for audacity and get all the dub effects you want. Everything we have is better than what they had, except that it’s somehow worse. Trying to recreate it is like trying to reconstruct the pyramids. There might still be amazing things, but we’ll never get that particular flavor of amazing back.

Hopeton Brown, aka The Scientist, was a King Tubby protogé seen here adapting his weirdo dub strategies to a Sci Fi theme without really changing anything besides titles about Star Trek and stuff. Music by hardworking session band Roots Radics. All the space and otherness via Brown, his engineers, and Channel One Studios’s generous but not-too-generous 16-track recorder.

RIYL

You can hear me say pretty much the same thing in different words in the other Scientist write-up I’ve done, which I’d forgotten about.