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Selected by The Waxonia Desk

The Waxonia Desk’s selection

Six records tracing one continuous line from a Kingston mixing desk to a Chicago dance floor. The claim is that dub never stopped: it changed tempo, crossed an ocean, and kept going under other names.

Autoplay · All 6 play here · plays through and starts again

  1. Augustus Pablo / King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown

    1976 · Yard Music

    The starting point for the argument every record below repeats: a mix is a composition. The debt the others owe is as much to the economics that made a B-side worth rebuilding as to the technique itself.

  2. The Revolutionaries / Kunta Kinte Dub

    1976 · Well Charge

    A Kingston rhythm that reappeared, sped up, in British jungle two decades later. The clearest single piece of evidence for a continuity that is usually asserted rather than shown.

  3. Shy FX & UK Apache / Original Nuttah

    1994 · SOUR

    Jungle at the exact moment the sound system and the sampler stopped being separate traditions. Everything Kingston built into a rhythm arrives here at twice the speed with none of it lost.

  4. Wiley / Eskimo

    2002 · Wiley Kat

    The coldest record here and the one with the least obvious Jamaican inheritance. It earns its place by testing the line: grime keeps the sound system and throws the warmth away.

  5. Burial / Archangel

    2007 · Hyperdub

    A label's most famous record, made almost entirely out of the residue of the others. Hauntology was a useful word for it precisely because the music is assembled from things that have already happened.

  6. DJ Rashad / Feelin

    2013 · Hyperdub

    Chicago, not London, and still recognisably part of the same project. Either the argument ends here or it stops being about Britain, and the record is better evidence for the second.