(Photo: Liquid Design)
It sure is raining here in the brutal bottleneck of boredom. When I was at primary school we had to do descriptive writing about the weather every morning. I know about 500 words for “Inclement”, that’s the only kind of weather we really get in Invercargill. I managed to convince Dayna that “Invercargill” is pronounced “Invacado” last night, ahhh the joys of being a grandparent. I just finished talking to Josh FFF on facebook and he is doing a feature on the new music I have been doing and playlisting it today. There is a groundswell here, in Aotearoa. I am not real sure that its a new thing or its just because I was asleep for a few years but people are definitely more productive, involved and industrious in the arts than they have been for a while. I know that things all move in cycles. My very first original tune spoke about this. I remember sitting at my bedroom window, maybe 14 or 15 years old, playing Aminor, Dminor and Eminor to the words “Things all move in cycles, the sun, the moon, the stars, the earth, people move like all else…” blah blah blah. It became a Jahna song 5 years later. If I could’ve told that boy that he would still be sitting in the bedroom window dreaming, 25 years later (give or take), I think he might’ve been a bit more comfy in his skin, less fearful. It’s ok, he got here in the end.
I still feel an urge to address the things inside my heart. I am determined to do it with songs now. I feel like it was completely unfair of me to drag my lovers and my friends into the frame via this blog. The decision to delete 6 months worth of writing was a good one. It all exists as documents but I doubt I will ever have the courage to revisit it… Here’s the thing. We all have secrets. We all expose ourselves gradually to each other. None of us tell the whole story all at once, we open up slowly, like flowers in the sun. As we trust more, we divulge our secrets, our fears, our hopes and our ideals. Should we be quick to judge or assume things about each other then we do so at our peril. However, sometimes we must just accept that perhaps people are exactly what they say, no more, no less. Me, for instance. I am an artist. I wake up each morning and create. I do not plan, I do not really know what the date is or even what day of the week it is sometimes. I truly could not tell you my age with any certainty. 42, 43 or 44 I think. One of them. That doesn’t bother me anymore. I see now that most men only really come into their prime around this age. Imagine that Kurt, Jim, my mate Lee and so many others never really even got to reach their stride and look at the amazing things they accomplished. There is always hope, dearest reader.
So, lets talk about DUB. Bob Marley was a cool dude. No doubt about it. But there is much contradiction and falsehood attached to the myth of him. Dub seems to sidestep the cult of personality, almost as a rule. Dub is not concerned with trends, individuals or celebrity. Bob was a celebrity, any way you want to cut it. Don’t get me wrong, not for one moment. He is responsible for so much. My earliest memories are of my love for this man and his friends and the music they made. Look at my country! He is as much a historical figure here as any tangata whenua. He is like an unofficial rangatira, heh, with more integrity and mana than any I can think of off the top of my head.. Well, Norm Kirk, Api Ngata, Witi Ihimaera, Zed Brookes and Jase Kerrison aside. Dub, however, is not Reggae. Dub is humble where reggae is brash. Dub is meditative where Reggae is demonstrative and Dub innovates where Reggae instigates. I do not make Reggae music, I never have. I’m not so sure that Dub is a Rasta art either. Lee Perry makes that real clear. He fucken burned the Black Ark down rather than let the Rastafarians taint it. I love that. Dub is single handedly responsible for pretty much everything that isn’t Rock, orchestral or folk/world music and a large chunk of what is. Pink Floyd is arguably a great Dub band, even Led Zep have some moments, Punk is Dub as fuck. The first thing Johnny Rotten does after the pistols is start PiL, one of the great English Dub bands. HipHop is a direct descendant of “Toasting” and The Dancehall led to Drum and Bass and all kinds of Techno, right up to the Dubstep revolution and all the best bits of contemporary pop. Listen to Twenty One Pilots, away from the singles and you will pretty quickly realise how much of an influence dub is on them. Sublime are a great example of the evolution of Dub… They were (ARE) Blues, Punk, Rock, HipHop, Jazz, Ska and House all rolled into one sweaty, semi naked posse of glorious. Aphex Twin… say no more…
I think the thing I like about dub is that, at its foundation, it is the art of production. The Grandaddy of Dub, King Tubby, was basically a studio producer with a love of gadgets and how they could manipulate sound. He transformed music, elevated what was already there. His background in electronics is one of the great accidents of Rock mythology. Legend has it that they would import all kinds of weird and wonderful audio effects and devices, pull them apart and rewire them to see what would happen or because they weren’t really doing ENOUGH out of the box. That’s me right there, that’s an 8 year old kid setting up a couple of Tape decks and wiring them up to create loops and feedback effects, weird and wonderful tape recordings of pure madness! I wish I had those tapes! Google the phrase “Montage Of Heck” for an example of why I’m not alone in my peculiarities… I see Vader and Awhi doing the same things with “Photobooth” and Skypes’ video message functions.
So Tubby, Lee “Scratch” Perry, The Scientist and a few others were the first creators of Dub. They took recordings of bands, sometimes multitracked, sometimes not and manipulated the sounds with delays, reverbs and eventually samples. They took instrumental tracks, without the lead vocals and had furious and artful wordsmiths brag, bluster and bruise over the top… Drenched in tacky reverbs, way over stressed delay units, overdriven phasers and chorus effects. They created an artform of what had become a pretty sedate and safe industry; production. By the time this was all happening, the record industry had sort of coagulated and production principles seemed to be stagnating to all hell, the record companies had placed the producer on a pedestal and guarded those secrets like masons, culminating in decades of shit that all sounded the same. No wonder Reggae and Dub swept the world as it has!
King Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptown is a fantastic example of the whole process. A fairly straight forward recording situation being mangled beyond all reason into something glorious and lasting. I get excited talking about it but please don’t get the idea that I’m an expert, I’m not. Despite being surrounded by Dub from birth, I only really discovered it a few years ago. I’m not even sure how, I just happened upon a few documentaries at a time when the music I was making myself seemed to be tending towards a definite skank. Mind every single pun in there. Sorry. Sort of. So even though its new to me, Dub has been cranking out that fantastic sound ever since. Soundsystems and Dub groups, producers and D.Js have been making Dub in Aotearoa for decades and are some of our most enduring, consistent and truthful artists. Fat Freddys, Salmonella Dub the two most obvious but certainly not the only ones, a whole sub culture grew up around this stuff in the 90s and only got bigger and bigger as Dance music carried on its trajectory away from Pop. These days you wouldn’t even recognise our most accomplished music makers if you met them on the street, they aren’t at the grammys or even the tuis probably, they are probably in Goa or Detroit or Ibiza or Paris. Point is, Dub is unstoppable and unconcerned with anything but the groove and connecting with the heart of the listener. Lee Perry describes it like this.. The Bass is the Brain and the Drum is the heart, the rest is Dub.
I feel blessed to be a part of this family. I feel truly fortunate to not only have the talents to make the music but also to have the tools and the knowledge to create the Dubs from the music I make. It is a two step process and I think its rare to find people doing both. I have been trying to craft a kind of Dub/Trance/Psychedelic sound of my own. It is music for dancing, it is music for taking drugs, it is music for making love, making art and making friends. It changes the world and has been shaping a better one for 5 decades.
Wow. Where did that come from aye? Not my normal morning whinge-fest! So, now Im going to go back into the lab and get back to work. I picked up my bass from the venue last night so now I have some work to catch up on. Josh is a fucken cool dude man. The first time I met him he came around to my flat to pick up some gear they were borrowing for Kiwiburn. We sat and talked for an hour or so and listened to Dark Side of The Moon and then they bailed. Afterwards my flatmate commented that I have great friends and I told him that I’d never set eyes on that guy before in my life. He was shocked. From the way we interacted, he thought we’d known each other our whole lives! That’s the impression I get of Josh, he is a love factory, pumping it out into the atmosphere like a forest gives off oxygen or like Dub oozes basslines! He lives fiercely and fearlessly and he is a brother in that he has lived a life dedicated to art, music and love without deviation or doubt.
Life is about cycles. To live is to die. Cold hard comfort but comfort nonetheless. I miss my Nan, I miss my Grandma and I miss my Mama but I am here, my Dad is here, my brother is here, my Kids are here and their mamas are here too. Cathy is here and there is always cheese, for when shit gets real grim. Take heart, gentle reader, for every downbeat, there is an upshot, for every uptown girl, there is an ugly boy and for every midnight there is a sunrise waiting patiently behind it… xxx Mark Edward Te Haupa Tupuhi (marshall mathers fan and dairy enthusiast)
“Daisies Of The Galaxy”
Take heart, my little friend
And push back your seat
Soon we’ll be far away
Far from the street
Where you learned how to be
Not what you are
Up on the shoulder
There is a town
With a little motel
And an old movie house
We’ll go to a movie
Whatever it is
Watching the movie
The world’s gonna end
And there ain’t a place for
A boy and his friend
To go
I’ll pick some daisies
From the flower bed
Of the galaxy theater
While you clear your head
I thought some daisies
Might cheer you up
marktupuhiblog 
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