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Read
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Dub
Assassin:
Techno, straight outta Chapel Hill
Marc
Weidenbaum
Feature
Article in the 'Picks' Section -April 1999, Pulse Magazine, Tower
Records
"The music? We call it didge-ital," rants a character in Bruce
Sterling's late-'80s science fiction novel Islands in the
Net. "Dig-ital, see, D.J.-Ital. ... Mash it up right on
the ship."
Tim Harper, a.k.a.
Dub Assassin, mashes his music up in Chapel Hill, N.C. And his new
album, Tekkno Boy (on Freakadelic Records, of which
he's part-owner), makes good on Sterling's prescient rendering of
digital culture's intersection with dub-reggae experimentation.
Tekkno tracks like "Seagulls" graft varieties of warehouse-party
rhythms and keyboard sounds together into a pounding, other-worldly
experience, while the varying, hallucinogenic metrics of "Dream
Control" and "Cosmos" challenge DJs who expect a cut to maintain
the same pace throughout.
Harper got his virgin taste of studio wizardry observing one of
Bob Marley's soundmen. "That was the first time I had seen someone
spin effects into each other," says Harper. "He would take the
delay and toss it into the reverb, and it would give it a nice
little noise."
If Tekkno Boy isn't dub per se, it still feeds generously
on the interaction of sonic events, sometimes the sort of machinations
described above, often the prismatic overlay of house beats, triggered
samples, and scene-setting synth washes. "The way I saw it," Harper
says, explaining his DJ name, "there was a lot of use of delays
and repeating of the same lines."
The
story doesn't end there. Harper may be the only techno musician
christened by one of "alternative" rock's founders: Chris Stamey,
best known for his band the dBs and as a major figure in the scene
that gave us R.E.M. and Matthew Sweet, among others. Stamey and
Harper, who supports himself as a studio engineer, run in the
same circles. "I played him stuff and he turned to me and said,
'You're the assassin, the assassin of sound."
-
Rick
Anderson
All-Music
Guide/CD HotList
You
forget how much mediocre techno music there is out there until
you come across an album this good and suddenly realize how
bored you've been. Dub Assassin, like Fatboy Slim and 1.8.7,
is the name of a solo artist who writes and produces all of
his own material. Unlike those others, however, Dub Assassin
prides himself on creating all of the sonic raw material out
of which his music is fashioned by himself, digitally, rather
than relying on analog recordings of found sounds and R&B breakbeats.
This
approach works in his favor, for the most part. "Conundrum"
builds an industrial-strength house beat out of almost organic-sounding
digital pieces, and "Dream Control" juxtaposes gorgeous, Eno-esque
synth washes with bracing midtempo breakbeats to marvelous effect.
Occasionally the strictly digital approach comes off a bit antiseptic,
as on the attractive but sterile "Xenodub." But overall, this
is a very rewarding album.
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