April 25 - May 2, 1 9 9 6

The Mad Professor: Dub's Main Man

"The Mad Professor" refers not to the suspected "Unabomber" or to an untenured instructor but to England's Neil Frazer, arguably the most accomplished practitioner of dub music on the planet. Dub is an outgrowth of reggae -- you use mixing-board experimentation to reduce multi-track recordings into separate strands of sound and then apply electronic special effects (echo, delay, noise) to each sound thread, heavily foregrounding bass and drums. The Prof has been creating dub records at his Ariwa studio in London since the late '70s; two new albums from him offer as overwhelming an introduction to the best of dub as anyone could hope for.

Massive Attack vs. The Mad Professor: No Protection (Gyroscope) is a radical remixing of Massive Attack's 1994 Protection (Virgin). After listening to Massive Attack's pop-oriented techno-soul-reggae, the Mad Professor has opened up lively caverns between the peaks of big beat, exemplifying the dub producer's art of making novel sounds resonate in the spaces between the expected song beats.

The opening track, "Radiation Rules the Nation," is a perfect example of the Professor's dub style. The original tune, the title track of Massive Attack's 1994 album, showcases a high-gloss romantic vocal by Tracey Thorn (of Everything But the Girl fame). The Professor deconstructs Tracey's vocal into a shower of sexy sibilants surrounded by elephantine bass blasts, drawn-out drum explosions, and chimy electric guitar. The slow ominous groove of the original track becomes more so.

"Trinity Dub" remixes "Three," a vocal showcase for the Nigerian singer Nicolette, who possesses a smooth-as-Sade style not unlike Thorn's. This Massive Attack song utilizes -- you have to concentrate hard to hear it -- a looped electronic noise that sounds exactly like the sound a computer's hard disc makes when playing a CD-ROM. In his remix the Professor is happy to fragment and dent the silky beauty of Nicolette's voice, sinking the shards deep in the mix while elevating the zippy hard-disc squeal. A perverse and punky refusal of conventional pop beauty? No, in this context the computer noise is actually a sensual and parallel (if inhuman) vocal track. It may sound easy -- the ravings of a drugged brain at a studio's mixing board? -- but there is a consistent musical sense here.

The Mad Professor's mixes mark love affairs with reggae's musical textures. The laid-back rhythm-section notes and harmonic colors of reggae are electronically transfigured by his mixes into a more jittery and cosmopolitan fabric than most Jamaican reggae offers. A characteristically bubbly Jamaican rhythm used on Massive Attack's "Weather Station" becomes the wildly reverbed drum patterns on the Professor's "Cool Monsoon," as he turns a dance-club number into atmospherically hazy, nearly viscous chamber music for meditation.

Jah Shaka Meets Mad Professor at Ariwa Studios is the first domestic release of a 1983 album by the militant Afrocentric Jamaican multi-instrumentalist collaborating with the Mad Professor. "People of Yoruba" is a stately Afro-Caribbean march, a high-stepping anthem with wicked steel drums colliding with Jamaican drums. It was included on last year's Mad Professor "Best of" compilation, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Professor (Ras). But you needn't be a madman to be charmed by this dubmeister's deft touch at the mixing board.

-- Norman Weinstein

(The Mad Professor perform at Mama Kin Tuesday, April 30.)