Love is the Message: Dance, Music and Counterculture
This is an excerpt of a full length episode currently only available to patrons. To become a patron and support what we're doing from £3 per month, head to www.patreon.com/LoveMessagePod.
In this patrons-only episode, Jeremy and Tim begin a multi-part exploration of what we're calling Heavy Dub Theory: a deep dive on the aesthetic, musicological and theoretical understandings of dub. We start with a discussion of the materiality of bass as expressed in the concept of Bass Materialism - how bass frequencies behave in space, are felt in our bodies, and how bass music rejected and upset prevailing musical expressions of white heteropatriarchal culture.
We also consider how dub composition is organised around subtraction rather than addition - a fact it shares with the contemporaneous school of Minimalism - and make the case that dub is anti-climactic, anti-telos, and ultimately breaks with traditional musical conceptions of time all together.
We'll be back in a fortnight with the next iteration of Heavy Dub Theory.
Produced and edited by Matt Huxley.
Tracklist:
A Tribe Called Quest - Vibes and Stuff
Steve Reich - Come Out
King Tubby & Observer All Stars - Rema Dub
King Tubby & Jacob Miller - City Of The Weakheart Dub
Peter Tosh - Mystic Man
Books:
Paul C. Jasen - The Low End Theory; Bass, Bodies and the Materiality of Sonic Experience
Julian Henriquez - Sonic Bodies
Steve Goodman - Sonic Warfare
Jeremy Gilbert & Ewan Pearson - Discographies
Tricia Rose - Black Noise
Henri Bergson - Matter and Memory