Jah Wobble The seeking path by Anil Prasad

Photo: John Hollingsworth

There’s virtually no context Jah Wobble hasn’t explored with dub bass. Whether it’s punk, jazz, electronica, Middle Eastern, African, Celtic, Chinese, Japanese, industrial, or avant-garde realms, he’s figured out a way to make it work seamlessly and imaginatively. The British multi-instrumentalist and composer has built his career on defying expectations and taking chances. His prolific and diverse discography of dozens of albums serves as a testament to his drive to keep learning, evolving and morphing.
In just the last 18 months, Wobble has put out four albums, two EPs and many singles. Two of those releases, Ocean Blue Waves and Realm of Spells, were made with his multi-decade group Invaders of the Heart. He first formed the band in 1982 as a way of bridging the worlds of dub, world fusion, jazz, rock, and pop. Ocean Blue Waves is its tenth album.
Realm of Spells finds the band collaborating with bassist and producer Bill Laswell, who Wobble has worked with on several projects, previously. The album was inspired by Wobble and Laswell’s shared interest in Miles Davis’ Dark Magus period, during which the jazz legend was performing his most experimental, rhythm-based music...

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Down The Line 'Lock Down Special' (Part 1)

Jon Hassell • Seeing Through Sound (Pentimento Volume Two)

“Listen as if you were being told a secret” - Federico Fellini

A companion piece to 2018’s Listening To Pictures, this second volume in the pentimento series presents eight new tracks by the music visionary, continuing his lifelong exploration of the possibilities of recombination and musical gene-splicing. Pentimento is defined as the “reappearance in a painting of earlier images, forms, or strokes that have been changed and painted over” and this is evident in the innovative production style that ‘paints with sound’ using overlapping nuances to create an undefinable and intoxicating new palette.

In classic Hassell fashion, the title can be interpreted in a myriad of ways, but perhaps the most pertinent at the moment is the human instinct to sing and play through a rain of difficulties. A future blues of indeterminate and ever-shifting shape. The album is buffered by two 8-minute plus epics at the beginning and the end - the hypnotic “Fearless” with it’s metronomic, almost Can-like rhythm, and blurry, noir-ish texture of sound emerging like car headlights from the fog; mirrored at the end of the record by the beautiful sci-fi lullaby of “Timeless”, a track with a gaseous, billowing quality as electronic clicks and bubbles float over a landscape of shimmering, glacially paced complexity. The bridge between those two worlds is no less compelling, from the frantic, spidery IDM sketch of “Reykjavik” to the collapsed-time ballad of “Unknown Wish”. Whilst containing seeds of classic ‘fourth world’ fusion, this record finds the artist still questing to create new forms and mutations of music, a thrilling window into what music could sound like in a world to come.  

Jon Hassell

 releases July 24, 2020