That testifies to the restraint of its creators.
Kevin Martin (The Bug) and Michael Fiedler (Ghost Dubs) share a talent for paring music down to an essence.
None of the record’s six tracks—the first three credited to The Bug and the remainder to Ghost Dubs—have vocals. Nor do they feature the staccato keyboard or guitar chords expected by listeners who came to dub through reggae.
All that remains are brutalist low-frequency pulsing and an assortment of noises that would be hard to classify as music were they freed from bondage to the bass line. If you were listening to heavy machinery underwater, this is what it would sound like.
Imploded Versions communicates a maximalist minimalism, like one of Richard Serra’s massive metal sculptures. It’s heavy in a way that the conscious mind struggles to comprehend.
This makes the record a worthy addition to the catalogue of Kevin Martin’s Pressure imprint, which has been releasing Fiedler’s material alongside Martin’s dubbier experiments, among other things. Its roster appeals to fans of the Hyperdub label and Basic Channel who want to feel the force of the blow, even if it hurts.
In his liner notes for the record, Kevin Martin explains that his contributions are a tribute to the great Jah Shaka, who helped to spread dub culture throughout the United Kingdom with his travelling sound system starting in the 1970s, before passing away in 2023.
Martin singles out the musician’s “epic, earth-moving sessions at The Rocket in Holloway Road, which were partly responsible for my present roots reggae and bass addiction”. For Martin, the UK Steppers movement that Shaka spearheaded during the early years of Thatcherism “captured the future-shock energy Jamaican music at its best”. Building on that legacy, Imploded Versions is intended as “a new form of spectral dub… immersive and implosive”.
This is where things get tricky.
Although it’s obvious that Martin and Fiedler have tremendous respect for their dub forebears, something is bound to get lost in translation, from both historical and geographical standpoints.
The Bug’s three versions of a song titled “Militants” underscore the problem. Jah Shaka was fully committed to Rastafarian culture and saw his records and travelling sound system as a way to strengthen the Caribbean diaspora in the UK. Taking his sound out of context threatens to drain it of deeper meaning.
Even if Imploded Versions would sound tremendous played in a public space at high volume, it feels too involuted to hit the way Jah Shaka’s sound system did.
In a 1991 interview for Snub Tv, Shaka concentrates on its social function. “Some people that go to church will consider it like gospel music,” he notes. “It’s not being played on a commercial level. It’s being played religiously, with devotion.”
That’s where the bass comes in.
“What we really work on, more than anything, is a frequency,” Shaka continues. “We would like to play very deep, that people could stand in front of the speakers.”
In a sense, the point is not to make music to be heard, but music that transcends hearing.
As its title suggests, Imploded Versions is also oriented towards this state beyond sound. But in the absence of the visual component to performances that Jah Shaka emphasised, not to mention the spectacle of diverse bodies set in motion, it threatens to supplant collective passion with post-theological subjectivity.
This gives the record’s minimalism a different valence than the dub plates that inspired it.
Dub means doing more with less.
That’s as true today as it was in the 1970s, when producers developed the musical equivalent of Hamburger Helper, releasing many different versions of the material recorded at a single session.
But this kind of recycling has a different impact than it did in the era of Lee Perry’s Black Ark studio. Now, even someone of limited means can craft songs the same way that only the most commercially successful musicians did back then. The accessibility of techniques that were once prohibitively expensive has made it possible for hermit outsider artists to create complex music that sounds professional.
While this is a welcome development, by and large, it places a premium on editorial acumen. When cost is no longer a concern, the problem is no longer scraping butter over too much bread, but avoiding the impulse to spread it too thickly.
The Bug and Ghost Dubs do that with aplomb. From a spiritual perspective, however, their economy strikes a discordant note.
Overcoming scarcity to make something nourish more people than seemed possible is miraculous. Repudiating plenitude, by contrast, can feel miserly.
This isn’t a problem exclusive to Imploded Versions. No matter how great the minimal dub of the past three decades sounds, in the absence of contributors with family ties to Caribbean music, it risks coming off as soulless. That’s why Paul St. Hilaire’s contributions to the Rhythm & Sound records from the early 2000s were so crucial.
The Bug and Ghost Dubs have produced a record that is bound to please fans of the dub aesthetic, particularly ones who are less invested in the cultural context that gave birth to it. To appreciate its strengths fully, though, listeners should seek out the work of Jah Shaka and other UK Steppers for comparison’s sake.
Sometimes the paring knife removes too much meat with the fat.
Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
