dreadcirculation

My favourite soundtracks are definitely The Secret Of Monkey Island One and Two (1990/91). This is a pirate adventure game set in the Caribbean, so they have an amazing Reggae soundtrack. This was the first Reggae I actually ever heard, we didn’t even know Bob Marley and all that back then.

Honestly, this guy turns up, whose name’s Jan, first time I met him was at this show. He gets his laptop out, he sets up his laptop, then he pulls out a PlayStation control and he plugs it in. I’m like “What are you doing? Are you going to play a game?” He’s like “No I use this to control…”. I’d got my nephew with me and I look at my nephew and I’m like “What is this?” And then he’s gone into his bag and he’s like “Solo, look this is the gem!” and he brought out a radio cassette player. You must know them, they were flat, about this [gestures] high, you press Eject and the thing comes up, and they had a handle that falls out like that. I’m like “Oh my…Where did you get that from! I haven’t seen one of them in years! What are you going to do with that?” He said “I’m going to record the show on it.” I’m like “You’re going to record it on that?” and he’s like “I know it’s old but the quality, the quality…” A little part of me, a naive part of me, was thinking that they were backward, no disrespect but they were backward. It was at that point there that I said to myself “You know what? These guys aren’t backward - they’re connoisseurs!” So then, we’re ready to do the show and I see him pull this big screen down from behind the stage and a guy turns up with these metal fly cases and open it up and he’s got an Atari, an original Atari in there! So I’m on stage singing while my man’s controlling, mixing the music with his PlayStation thing and there’s people in the crowd playing Frogger and Space Invaders on the special screen behind me! I was like “What the…???” That was one of the best nights of my life. I realised they were doing their thing and people were loving it.

“if you think about it, Japan is strongly tied into Jamaican and Western music since long. Almost every essential piece of electronic gear used in all styles of music since the 80s has been designed there: Roland and Boss (drum machines), Casio (synths), Akai (samplers), Nintendo (Gameboys), just to name a few. Our visit to Quarta 330 in the 5G vintage synth store in Tokyo (be jealous HERE) confirmed that theory. It is well known that the “Sleng Teng” riddim, Jammy$ biggest hit, is simply the “Rock” preset from the Casiotone MT-40 with an offbeat. So actually credit should not go to Jammy alone but to the Japanese engineer who came up with the most versioned bassline in Reggae of all times - in a Casio lab in Shibuya…

So it’s fair to say that the sounds from Japan and the technology around them left a severe mark in all new styles of music since three decades: what would Reggae be without the Casio synths or the Boss Dr. Riddim? What Hiphop without the TR-808 or the Akai MPC2000? What Techno without the TR-909 and the Juno?”

“On the other hand Dub and reggae are few on the whole.
You will be able to enclose the “dance music” them, Today it has been “into dance.”
In the meantime, here it is regarded as a separate stream.
Even in the case of C64, the deliberate development of dub began since the late 1990s finally.
Basically we had to wait for particularly goto80 and Mortimer Twang.
Turning to the machines of the same age of C64, Hirokazu Tanaka a.k.a. Hip Tanaka, a Nintendo sound designer (1980-1999), has been consciously oriented toward reggae from the 80s.
Meanwhile there no C64 musicians like him.
Therefore, there was few possibility that the dub and reggae made with the SID chip were known.
A few experimental cases of C64 Dub Reggae, however, are something more than quirky.
We should be paid more attention to their diversity.

This experimental results are not analyzed at all.
So I bring this compilation out.
More dub for C64 in the future.”