Juno Recommends Dub July 2018

Review: Anyone with even the most rudimentary knowledge of hip-hop history will tell you that the roots of rapping can be traced back to the early '70s spoken word albums of The Last Poets. It's because of this that the collective's recent album, Understand What Black Is (their first for nearly two decades), was such a big deal. Here the title track is given the remix treatment. Mala handles the A-side, delivering vocal and instrumental passes that re-cast the track as a skanking, dub-wise excursion full of ricocheting electric piano notes and suitably heavy bass. 2000 Black main men Dego and Kaidi Tatham take a more up-tempo approach on the flip, wrapping the Poets conscious vocals and instrumentation around their own fizzing broken beat rhythms, jazz-funk chords and darting electronics.

Review: Paul Dickow is the man behind the Strategy project and this album was first released by Khaliphonic in 2018 and now reissued on wax. The artist has long been thought of as a musical polymath who has spent his life immersed in hardware and crafting unique sounds across the dub spectrum. This record proves that and then some with a mix of dub techno, digi-dub and everything in between. The rhythms are deep and involving, the synths often icy and the percussion is just enough to elevate each tune next to sci-fi signifiers and cosmic motifs.