Radioaxiom: A Dub Transmission

Radioaxiom: A Dub Transmission

ASIN: B00005O7U8

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Bassist and producer Bill Laswell's prolific output tends to blur his projects together in the senses. A Dub Transmission, however, leaps out of this sonic fog. It could've been called Thundering Bass, as he teams up with another denizen of deep bass boom, Jah Wobble. Recalling Laswell's Material album, Hallucination Engine, and to a lesser degree Hear No Evil, A Dub Transmission is a throbbing, shifting fabric of dub bass lines, free improvisation, and sound manipulation. Among the musicians whose performances are mixed and morphed are horn players Nils Petter Molvaer and Graham Haynes, keyboardist Amina Claudine Myers, and percussionists Karsh Kale, Hamid Drake, Sly Dunbar, and Aiyb Dieng. Add in longtime Laswell accomplice guitarist Nicky Skopelitis, and it's a wedding of wild spontaneity, digital composition, global grooves, and electronic moods. Ejigayehu "Gigi" Shebabaw guests on "Alsema Dub," giving the album a more celebratory turn than most of A Dub Transmission's deliriously dark, cyberhallucinations. --John Diliberto

Tracks:

Subcode
Alsema Dub
Virus B
Orion
6th Chamber
Alam Dub
Second Sight

Amazon.com

Bassist and producer Bill Laswell's prolific output tends to blur his projects together in the senses. A Dub Transmission, however, leaps out of this sonic fog. It could've been called Thundering Bass, as he teams up with another denizen of deep bass boom, Jah Wobble. Recalling Laswell's Material album, Hallucination Engine, and to a lesser degree Hear No Evil, A Dub Transmission is a throbbing, shifting fabric of dub bass lines, free improvisation, and sound manipulation. Among the musicians whose performances are mixed and morphed are horn players Nils Petter Molvaer and Graham Haynes, keyboardist Amina Claudine Myers, and percussionists Karsh Kale, Hamid Drake, Sly Dunbar, and Aiyb Dieng. Add in longtime Laswell accomplice guitarist Nicky Skopelitis, and it's a wedding of wild spontaneity, digital composition, global grooves, and electronic moods. Ejigayehu "Gigi" Shebabaw guests on "Alsema Dub," giving the album a more celebratory turn than most of A Dub Transmission's deliriously dark, cyberhallucinations. --John Diliberto

Customer Reviews:

great dub.......2005-07-04

i really enjoyed this album. when i bumped it in israel in our rental car, the one that i installed a jl audio 8w7 in a 1cbft ported enclosure with a 250/1 off a sony deck, people would come up to the window and tell me the my trunk was rattling and look totally confused as to what was going on. perhaps they thought my car was going to explode?

Trumpet Renaissance.......2005-03-03

Usually, when I hear trumpets I run a mile. But this album has trumpets on it, and conversely I find myself drawn towards it, towards the trumpets. They are used sparingly, and perhaps that is the key to trumpet success; use them, but sparingly. Jah Wobble and Bill Laswell are both basssists who play the bass guitar, and they are also quite formidable in the field of serious-faced artistic ambient world music which was so popular from about 1993-1995, but which is nowadays ignored and derided and almost suppressed, viz The Future Sound of London, who are nowadays ignored and derided and almost suppressed, or the Orb, who are nowadays ignored and derided and almost suppressed. Bill Laswell is more serious-faced than Jah Wobble, despite which this album is an unpretentious, sometimes haunting collection of bass-heavy tunes which roll on for six minutes or so, and then move on to the next track, except at the end of the album when it rolls back to the first track if you have set your CD player to do so.

Firstly I shall name the guilty. 'Second Sight' and 'Orion' are rubbish, because they have organs on them and I hate organs. I don't listen to them any more and I've scratched them out of the CD and I hope you do the same, as well. 'Alsema Dub' is the stand-out, a simple, sad-sounding thing with a man singing, his name is apparently Ejigayehu Shebabaw, and he only sings a few words, and there is a woman singing with him, and it works superbly. The song sounds sad and distant but not doomy, it sounds like the wind moving across sand dunes, across cities made of sand. There are dashes of electronic piano and it sounds as I imagine north African music to sound, although I want to stress that I have never been to north Africa and would probably not like it very much.

'Alam Dub' follows a similar pattern, although with a lady singing. There's no reason to call either this or the previous track 'Dub', because the whole album is dub. It's redundant. 'Alam Dub' is reminiscent of the stuff Wobble did on 'Rising Above Bedlam' with Natacha Atlas, but less poppy and with a jazzier feel (the electronic pianos and trumpets, there, both instruments associated with jazz). 'The 6th Chamber' ends with two minutes of the best trumpets I have ever heard, and should have been the final track on the album, which could easily have been much longer. I don't know from where two bassists got the idea of adding trumpets to their music, but it's their masterstroke. Perhaps they found a trumpet somewhere, or they had a friend who could only communicate via the medium of brass.

'Virus B' and 'Subcode' are both generic, the former with a vaguely Talking Heads-esque world music feel, the latter very much a decent-quality filler track. The production sometimes sounds dated - the pointlessly time-stretched drums, perhaps an attempt to sound current - but on balance five out of seven is a good strike rate. When I go to the toilet, blood comes out. The Amazon review above describes this as a series of 'deliriously dark cyberhallucinations', which is nonsense because the mood is generally lightweight and upbeat, and there's nothing wrong with that, and the 'cyber' quotient is limited essentially to the odd drum treatments and nothing else. Trumpets are not digital, they are acoustic.

Alter state of consciousness........2004-12-30

I was trying to find some decent (ambient?) stuff to add to my collection which is dominated by industrial and psytrance (not for the feint of heart). The most chill stuff I have is "effector" by download and "the ghost of each room" by cevin key, which can still be a grating listen. I tried "music has the right to children" by boards of canada and "music for cats" by cevin key and returned them for this.
It is a far cry from anything else I have but it holds its own. It has enough moments that give you goose bumps. I love the echo/ reverb on the trumpet - an instrument I loathe to hear in any music. In fact, many of the (pretty traditional) instruments, seem treated with some sort of effect or other giving it a very spacey feel. (Foreign) vocals (also treated?) accompany two of the tracks, and are not of this world - incredible!
If you are in search of music to accompany your forays into altered states of consciousness, especially of the psychedelically inclined, give this a try. It even has two luminous (magic?) mushrooms on the cd cover.
When I put this on I can imagine being at a lapa, surrounded by bush and the sounds of african wildlife, drinking cocktails to the sound of running water as a cool evening approaches.... Very relaxed, mysterious, emotional and refreshing!
hmmmm yummy!
I recommend Ott (Blumenkraft) for those of you that enjoy this.

Bass: the Final Frontier.......2004-06-25

Reminiscent of "In a Silent Way" and "Bitches Brew", this excellent album combines bone-crunching, hypnotic bass lines with surrealistic trumpet motifs to paint a rainy night road mural of street markings, fence posts, and passing ghosts.

I wouldn't go quite so far as to rank it with such masterpieces as "Hallucination Engine" and "Road to the Western Lands", but it is definitely an order of magnitude above some of Laswell's less structured projects.

If you enjoy late 60's Miles Davis, or just about anything by Material, then definitely give this disc a whirl.

bass mechanix with bill's special spice added.......2004-04-28

this stuff really pounds on a system,it's got bill's "atmosphere" throughout the whole album,and it's quite cheap in price.buy it if you enjoy trippy,chilled bumps!

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