Kingston Dub

You're asking about a sound, but dub started as a manufacturing accident turned method — the B-side version cut for a sound system, then taken apart on the desk. The engineer is the artist here: Osbourne Ruddock, Errol Thompson, Lee Perry, Hopeton Brown.

What you're buying is a mix, not a song, and the same rhythm will turn up on twenty records wearing different clothes.

Kingston, roughly 1968 to 1985. It begins with vocal-less acetates cut for sound systems at Duke Reid's Treasure Isle, where Osbourne "King Tubby" Ruddock worked as disc cutter before building his own studio at 18 Dromilly Avenue, Waterhouse, Kingston 11 — the address stamped on the records themselves.

His four-track desk, high-pass filter and spring reverb set the template. Lee Perry's Black Ark in Washington Gardens ran parallel from 1973.

Channel One on Maxfield Avenue supplied the Hoo Kim brothers' rhythms; Joe Gibbs and Errol Thompson supplied another river of them. Producers Bunny Lee, Niney, Yabby You and later Junjo Lawes fed the machine.

Tubby trained the next bench: Prince Jammy, Philip Smart, Scientist. Tubby was shot dead outside his home in February 1989.

By then the method had crossed into UK sound systems, post-punk, hip-hop and everything bass-led since.

Who: Tubby at Dromilly Avenue, Perry at the Black Ark, Errol Thompson at Randy's and Joe Gibbs, Scientist and Jammy on the apprentice bench, Augustus Pablo with a melodica and his own Rockers label.

What: a known rhythm stripped to drum and bass, then fragments thrown back in — a snare drowned in reverb, a horn line that appears once and vanishes. How a record gets in: it has to be a version.

The rhythm comes from somewhere else, usually a vocal hit, and the mix is the authorship. Scientist's Vampires rhythms were cut at Channel One by the Roots Radics and mixed at King Tubby's — that division of labour is the scene in one credit line.