In Jamaican dancehall music, a riddim is the instrumental accompaniment to a song and is synonymous with the rhythm section. Jamaican music genres that use the term consist of the riddim plus the voicing sung by the deejay. A given riddim, if popular, may be used in dozens—or even hundreds—of songs, not only in recordings but also in live performances.
Osbourne Ruddock, better known as King Tubby, was a Jamaican sound engineer who influenced the development of dub in the 1960s and 1970s.
Lee "Scratch" Perry was a Jamaican record producer, composer and singer noted for his innovative studio techniques and production style. Perry was a pioneer in the 1970s development of dub music with his early adoption of remixing and studio effects to create new instrumental or vocal versions of existing reggae tracks. He worked with and produced for a wide variety of artists, including Bob Marley and the Wailers, Junior Murvin, The Congos, Max Romeo, Adrian Sherwood, Beastie Boys, Ari Up, The Clash, The Orb, and many others.
Dub is an electronic musical style that grew out of reggae in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is commonly considered a subgenre of reggae, though it has developed to extend beyond that style. Generally, dub consists of remixes of existing recordings created by significantly manipulating the original, usually through the removal of vocal parts, emphasis of the rhythm section, the application of studio effects such as echo and reverb, and the occasional dubbing of vocal or instrumental snippets from the original version or other works.
There are several subgenres of reggae music including various predecessors to the form.
Twilight Circus is the dub and reggae project of multi-instrumentalist Ryan Moore, former bassist and drummer of the Legendary Pink Dots. Twilight Circus is becoming increasingly popular and well known for Moore's work with artists such as Big Youth, Michael Rose of Black Uhuru and Ranking Joe. He originally started off producing dub albums, before recording vocalists for inclusion on his critically acclaimed Foundation Rockers album. In the classic tradition of reggae, Moore releases 10" vinyl record singles, often in limited edition.
Adrian Maxwell Sherwood is an English record producer specialising in the genre of dub music. He has created a distinctive production style based on the application of dub effects and dub mixing techniques to other forms of electronic dance music and popular music outside of the genre. He has worked extensively with a variety of reggae artists as well as the musicians Keith LeBlanc, Doug Wimbish and Skip McDonald. Sherwood has remixed tracks by Coldcut, Depeche Mode, The Woodentops, Primal Scream, Pop Will Eat Itself, Sinéad O'Connor, and Skinny Puppy. In his role as a record producer he has worked with a variety of record labels; however, his best-known label is On-U Sound Records which he founded in 1979. Sherwood has been a member of the band Tackhead. He considers himself tone deaf, and focuses on making sounds and noises rather than melody.
Michael Alec Anthony West, better known as Rebel MC and Congo Natty, is a British jungle producer, spiritual chanter and toaster. He has also gone by aliases including Conquering Lion, Blackstar, Tribe of Issachar, Lion of Judah, X Project and Ras Project.
Neil Joseph Stephen Fraser known by his stage-name Mad Professor, is a British dub music producer, engineer and remixer. He has collaborated with reggae artists Lee "Scratch" Perry, Sly and Robbie, Pato Banton, Jah Shaka and Horace Andy, as well as artists outside the realm of traditional reggae and dub, such as Sade, Massive Attack, The Orb, Gaudi, the Brazilian DJ Marcelinho da Lua, Grace Jones, and Perry Farrell.
Ariane Daniele Forster, known by her stage name Ari Up, was a German vocalist best known as a member of the English punk rock band the Slits.
Black Board Jungle, often called Blackboard Jungle Dub, is a studio album by The Upsetters. The album, originally released in 1973 under artist name "Upsetters 14 Dub", was pressed in only 300 copies and issued only in Jamaica.
Revolution Dub is a studio album by Jamaican dub producer Lee Perry and his studio band The Upsetters, released in 1975 by Cactus. The album, which features nine pared down dubs, was the last in a line of releases that year in which Perry began exploring the possible studio techniques at his recently opened studio Black Ark in Kingston, Jamaica. In addition to making early use of a drum machine, the album is characterised by unpredictable drops in the beat, drastic stereo panning and samples of dialogue from television series, particularly British sitcoms, while Perry sings on the album in an eccentric falsetto and portrays different personas, including television characters from Kojak and Doctor on the Go.
Dubstep is a genre of electronic dance music that originated in South London in the early 2000s. The style emerged as a UK garage offshoot that blended 2-step rhythms and sparse dub production, as well as incorporating elements of broken beat, grime, and drum and bass. In the United Kingdom, the origins of the genre can be traced back to the growth of the Jamaican sound system party scene in the early 1980s.
Foreign Beggars were an English hip hop and dubstep group. Since their formation in 2002, the group's trajectory had seen them evolve from an underground hip hop group to an electronic crossover act. The group consisted of four artists individually known as Orifice Vulgatron, Metropolis Graham, DJ Nonames, and Dag Nabbit. Vulgatron and Metropolis combined with Noisia to make the side project and supergroup "I Am Legion". They released their collaborative album I Am Legion on 2 September 2013.
Augustus "Gussie" Clarke is a roots reggae and dub producer who worked with some of the top Jamaican reggae artists in the 1970s and later set up his own Music Works studio.
Daniele Gaudi, better known as Gaudi, is an Anglo-Italian musician, solo artist and record producer based in London, who specialises in dub music, electronica, reggae and worldbeat. His distinctive production sound appears in a number of albums nominated for Awards and prizes such as Grammy Award 2019 -Best Reggae Album Of The Year- for Mass Manipulation by Steel Pulse and BBC Radio 3 Awards for World Music 2008 for the album Dub Qawwali by Gaudi & Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. His music work and contributions have topped international charts such as: Billboard Reggae Chart no.1 with the album Heavy Rain by Lee "Scratch" Perry, Billboard Reggae Chart no.1 with the album Mass Manipulation by Steel Pulse, Billboard Reggae Chart no.1 with the album Vessel of Love by Hollie Cook, Billboard Reggae Chart no.2 with "Rainford" by Lee "Scratch" Perry, UK Dance Chart no.1 with the album "Prism" by The Orb, no.1 with "Jus' Come " by Cool Jack, no.1 in the UK iTunes chart with "Blue Monday" by Dub Pistols, Gaudi, Dubmatix.
Tony Harrington, grew up in Bracktown, Lexington, Kentucky. He was often better known to his friends as Doctah X, was a DJ, singer, and musician who operated the House of Dub Studio in Columbus, Ohio, and hosted a radio program on WCRS Columbus. He died of natural causes on December 24, 2020, at his home in Columbus, Ohio.
Larry McDonald is a Jamaican percussionist. He was born in Port Maria, Jamaica in 1937. McDonald played congas with Carlos Malcolm's band, Toots and the Maytals and the Count Ossie Band. He plays a wide variety of traditional percussion instruments.
Dubblestandart is a dub reggae band from Vienna, Austria. They were founded in 1987 and achieved breakthrough success in 1992. The band has collaborated with Lee "Scratch" Perry, Ari Up from the Slits, and film director David Lynch, on their studio album Return From Planet Dub in 2009. They describe their style as "hi-energy dub" or "21st century dub".
Andrew Moon Bain is a visual artist, record producer, musician, songwriter, and designer. He grew up in Seattle, Washington, where he was very active in the arts as a youth. He was a young cellist in the Seattle Youth Symphony Orchestras from ages 8–12. He also formed a hip-hop group in high school and later an original rock band with his younger brother. He relocated to Providence, Rhode Island as a young adult and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design. Bain remained in New England after earning his degree, subsequently becoming an active and integral member of Providence's exploding art community. His visual art is represented in numerous private collections, museums and at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum. In the summer of 2019, Bain did a large-scale wall installation at the Brown University Perry and Marty Granoff Center for the Creative Arts entitled “We Are All Carbon Beings”.
