Music Monday: An Introduction to Ambient Dub Music

Photo by Vu Hoang, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

It is a rarity in music when a genre is defined, and that definition is then adhered to for decades. Think of the difference between the music of Little Richard, The Beatles and Cream and consider that they are all considered to be Rock ‘n Roll. Rock music had begun to break into subgenres early on – Surf Rock, for example – but the genre splitting increased with time and other genres – such as, collectively, the many sub-subgenres of Metal – forming their own branch families. The throughline from Buddy Holly to Nirvana is one that can be traced through the decades, though they sound, in many ways, different.

Ambient Dub, on the other hand, is a genre artists fold themselves into, rather than try to expand and break from.

Some definitions and history are in order here.

What would come to be called Ambient music – music and sound design that aimed to be atmospheric and which did not adhere to traditional notions of song structure – has been around since the early 20th century works of Erik Satie. In the late 40’s, Pierre Schaeffer named the collection and manipulation of natural sounds musique concrète.

In 1952, John Cage performed 4’33, which required the pianist to sit silently at his piano for the allotted three minutes and 33 seconds. The sounds made by the audience were, thus, the music.

There were other developments – mostly technological – in the ensuing quarter century, the culmination of which was Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports, released in 1978.

At last, thanks to Eno, the genre had a name.

But we are not here to speak of just Ambient music today, so we must trace another path, as well.

Dub.

Dub is an offshoot of Reggae, and emerged in the late 60’s. The product of creative producers and mixing engineers, Dub featured, in its purest form, a reggae track stripped of its vocals and mix so that the rhythm section is featured and the insistent drip of delay – originally provided by the use of a Roland Space Echo unit – provides the track with accents and drive.

Sold in Jamaican barber shops and played from the same to folks walking the streets, Dub music was ready made to be toasted over, toasting being what would be called, first in the US and thence in the world, rapping.

Toasting was more conversational and less poetic than rapping, to be sure, but the combination of bass-heavy music and spoken word cannot be ignored.

There is a third strand, one which is not required, but is nonetheless very, very often a key contributor to the genre: House music. House is another genre which has shattered into countless subgenres, but for our purpose this history is straightforward. Disco had established itself over a driving 4/4 rhythm cocking it, generally speaking, at about 120 beats per minute. When Disco was declared to suck, there remained a core of folks who still enjoyed dancing to that rhythm who were driven underground by the anti-disco backlash. Consisting largely of the black and gay communities, particularly in Detroit, Disco morphed into a more instrumental music called House, named after one of the key venues where early House music could be found, The Hacienda.

There were other developments in other cities, Chicago in particular, but the roots of House music cannot be discussed without Detroit.

If Ambient Dub has a birthday, it would be the second of April, 1991: the day The Orb released The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld. The tracks were long, immersive and featured both the influence of musique concrète and Dub music.

The ground had been well prepared for the emergence of a new artist, one ready to peel back the layers of samples used by The Orb to create what is now, with minimal variation, considered to be Ambient Dub music.

Enter Basic Channel. Part artist, part record label, Basic Channel grew out of what might originally be called Hard Techno to eventually release their self-titled CD, an ambient, minimalist techno tour de force, in 1995.

Beginning in 1992, Mark Ernestus and Moritz von Oswald released a number of records on imprints of their own under a number of aliases. Many of these would be compiled on the Basic Channel album and released on the eponymous label. Their more club-friendly material would be released on M-Series, with a similar collection of edits and outtakes released on CD. They would also release records and an eventual compilation as Rhythm and Sound.

Underneath the panoply of aliases, Ernestus and von Oswald were, through time, developing a sound, initially particular to themselves, of minimal Ambient Dub Techno.

One of the hallmarks of their sound was the inclusion of tape hiss or vinyl surface noise. While this isn’t required nowadays, it did bring in another key artist: Stfan Betke, also known as Pole. In 1996 he dropped and broke a Waldorf pole filter. Liking the pop and hiss the filter gave his music he included it on his Ambient Dub albums.

In the ensuing decades and new millennium artists have added to the pallet of Ambient Dub music – the contributions of CV313, Quantec and Fluxion are particularly notable – but the genre has stayed, remarkably, comfortably within the bounds originally suggested by Ernestus and von Oswald.

It seems there will always be a place for that sound, and for this I am glad.