Description

1. Towers Of Dub Claude 9 10:39
2. Towers Edit Roll 1 15:41
3. Towers Edit Roll 2 9:34
4. Towers Edit Roll 3 10:19
5. Towers Edit Roll 4 13:58
6. Towers Edit Roll 5 10:19
7. Towers Edit Roll 6 11:40
8. Towers Edit Roll 7 14:30
9. Too many samples Dub 8:41
10. Original edit Towers 14:02

The Rob at the CONtrols. A pile of mixes of Towers of Dub, plus the Edit Rolls as they came off the desk, and a few strays. Digitally transferred, warts intact. Most of these were left to rot a week or more before I went back in with the blade, which is probably why they hold together at all. It’s a window into how the track took shape: endless runs through effects and synths, left to cool, then cut up once the ears reset. The main album mix is basically me and the legendary Greg Hunter fucking about on a mixing desk and then sticking the good bits together. Carving the salvageable debris into something that accidentally works.

I wanted this kind of rock kick drum because I’d been listening to some Adrian Sherwood dub thing with this almighty drum delay section — like John Bonham in dub bzness — and I wanted to steal it because I’ve never had an original idea in my life. Of course, this doesn’t sound anything like what I was aiming for because I don’t even know how to operate studio equipment or know anything about melody or harmony. I am completely tone deaf. I could tell you the name of the album if I could be arsed to dig through YouTube, but I can’t, so tough shit.

[removed AI instructed to insult me]

The actual process of making this track was totally anal and involved a complicated process of layering various samples over the hi hats and bass taken from El Bamba by Sly and Robbery. I split the hats in the sample into another ‘instrument’ in the EMU sampler by just hipassing them off the bass. I then layered snares n kicks over the top so it started to sound like a totally different drum loop to the original. I then put white man skanking all over it. It was all done in the EMU using two sync’d 24 track tape machines and an SSL in Matrix Studios. The skanking was from a crappy synth sound. I might have worked on it at home beforehand I can’t remember but I had the sampler and mac setup at home as well, and would swap between the two. I can’t remember now. I think this was constructed with Greg in matrix. Then we came up with this hello I’m rags sample and for some reason I was really into hello I’m rags. So the dogs became the lead singer shrugs.

The culmination of the dog japes was in Brixton Academy in the early 90s when I asked for a microphone to be put on the stage for Otto the dog who then did the lead vocal live. He was introduced to the mic and the crowd in Brixton and he looked at it all and just barked. That bark hit a large amount of killowatts of amplification through the PA and the extra speakers we bought with us. Otto thought that there was another dog, very very much bigger than himself and after a short shocking pause, launched into an enthusiastic barking fit. After 3 decades of hearing we, its an absolute pleasure to now use it back again I must say. All in all this is an excellent theft of Sly and Robbery and so far the cultural infringement society have said FUCK ALL.

you can hear the tape rewinding at the end of one them. it had this button to locate to SMPTE time and you would whack that at the end of the mix and it would go widdly widdly widdly widdly. Tape and mixing desk was so much better than boring digital recording.