On Repeat: Lee "Scratch" Perry: "Black Panta" [MP3; from Jonny Greenwood Is the Controller]
It's tempting whenever an artist selects music for a comp, like Jonny Greenwood does here in a trawl through the vast Trojan archives, to think about how the older music the artist digs might have made its way into his own work. With Radiohead and dub reggae, the parallels are obvious-- studio as instrument, audible seams imparted by technology front and center, a spacy sense of dislocation a given.
In any event, Greenwood picked a good one here, the opening track from the 1973 record Blackboard Jungle Dub, considered among the founding documents of the form. Taking a chugging instrumental laid down by a crack version of the Upsetters, Augustus Pablo, King Tubby, and Lee "Scratch" Perry slosh the whole thing around like the proverbial butcher, baker, and candlestick maker rub-a-dub-dubbing in a tub. Pablo beams in melodica from some ghostly plane of indeterminate origin, Scratch gurgles the kind of vocalese only he seems capable of, and Tubby spins alternate universes from each hit of echo. Wicked.
MP3: > Lee "Scratch" Perry: "Black Panta"
[from Jonny Greenwood is the Controller; due 03/06/07 on Trojan] | [PRE-ORDER]