Review Summary: “Conference in the Tub: The Influence of Dub Music on PERSON PITCH (2007)”
There’s a particular decision by legendary Jamaican dub producer Lee “Scratch” Perry (dead of an unspecified illness at age 85 in August 2021) on the song “Children Crying” from the epochal debut LP by The Congos, 1977’s HEART OF THE CONGOS, that never fails to call to mind the production decisions of Baltimore psychedelic pop quartet Animal Collective. The decision is a sound, a glorious noise, introduced about thirty seconds into the song “Children Crying,” whose origin is hard to identify: the growl of an animal? A whacked-out rain stick? The charge of pure electricity? It is a terrifying noise in some sense, primal and at odds with the pleading roots reggae of the song’s sonic backdrop otherwise, but it also fits seamlessly with the wilderness evoked by the lyrical themes, and remains a fascinating spectacle in its own right.
The indelible opening of Animal Collective’s most famous album, 2009’s MERRIWEATHER POST PAVILION, also opens with growls and rumbles, and they float along a similar ether of pretty chords, ripping little terrifying but beautiful holes in an otherwise placid sonic fabric. The effect in both cases is both animal and alien, and Animal Collective, on “In the Flowers,” perform their usual self-directed duty to somehow grasp at the appealing abstractions of their far-flung influences, figuring out ad hoc how to cobble together a compelling synthesis of old *** they find cool and *** they wanted to try out inventing for themselves. Just as soon as Lee “Scratch” Perry seems to have left his mark on MPP’s opener, so then does it transform into a synth rave-up the likes of which he would never gotten involved with.
Dub music is much more than a passing fancy, however, for the four magicians from Baltimore. The musical innovations of Jamaican producers like Perry, King Tubby, Harry Mudie, Horace Andy, and many others resonate throughout Animal Collective’s discography in ways major and minor. Stemming etymologically from the kind of “double” that would soundtrack “talkie” films post-THE JAZZ SINGER (1927) and referring materially to the acetate prints passed around by top Jamaican soundsystem operators remixing popular new tracks by removing the vocals and emphasizing the rhythm section, dub was a culturally bottlenecked explosion of new and weird sonic ideas in Jamaican DJ and production booths that eventually made its way to the UK after the dissolution of punk culture and in conjunction with Britain’s own early-‘80s reggae movement, immortalized in director Steve McQueen’s eponymous romance film LOVERS ROCK (2020). The echoing delay effect that resonates in both directions (i.e., in terms of both “attack” and “delay”), and which creates an enlarged sonic “footprint” for classic reggae timbres (like the “drop-3” snare/rim and bass drum hit, which you’ll notice everywhere if you count the beats out: “one two THREE four one two THREE four”, or a slapped electric guitar chord), was a wonderfully engaging mode of soundscaping for legions of mainstream and art musicians and music fans, and you can hear its languorous pull over all sorts of Animal Collective material, as well as over projects related to, inspired by, or that just kind of sound like AnCo.
But there’s one album in the Animal Collective universe where you can REALLY hear the influence of dub music all over: Panda Bear’s 2007 solo opus PERSON PITCH. PERSON PITCH, which famously sounds as if it were recorded underwater and occasionally even incorporates bubble noises and splashing to help the illusion along, deploys an array of techniques cribbed from the books of famous dub producers as well as Panda Bear’s own melodic and structural instincts, which are rooted in classic psychedelic and sunshine pop music from the 1960s but draw from traditions in West African jams, Nordic techno music, and so on. Dub is probably the first major genre one would think of upon listening to PERSON PITCH, though, because it’s everywhere: as on a classic dub album like KING TUBBY MEETS ROCKERS UPTOWN or IN DUB CONFERENCE VOLUME 1, the echo-y, aquatic “dub” sound does not disappear at any point throughout the record. Immediately, the album’s opening Hans Zimmer (?!) sample (from the soundtrack to reclusive Texan arthouse auteur Terrence Malick’s 1998 THE THIN RED LINE), the almost Gregorian one-chord chant of which clears a path for the record’s easy flow, is bolstered by a classic oddball Animal Collective noise, a clattering of a train upon tracks; both are lathered in delay, so that everything sounds slow-motion, radiant, wet.
So too does the controlled chaos of Panda Bear’s slate of production decisions remind one of Perry: on “Comfy in Nautica,” the odd wind noises that crescendo during the repeated phrase “GOOD TIME!!….GOOD TIME!!…”, as if Panda were being lifted away by a tornado while gripping his chair and reiterating on his happy message, are a perfect embodiment of the kind of contrapuntal tonal instincts Perry had on display during those HEART OF THE CONGOS recording sessions.
It’s not hard to find out that Panda Bear was influenced by dub music on PERSON PITCH, as the man went so far as to list many, many artists by whom he was inspired in large bold text on the album’s very LP sleeve. That list has been reproduced many times on the Internet, and even though it features artists like Kylie Minogue and Black Sabbath too, it features Mudie, Perry, Andy, and other Jamaican dub producers, as well as later, mostly European dub and ambient techno and house acolytes who took invaluable inspiration from those earlier stalwarts, Finland’s Sasu Ripatti AKA Vladislav Delay and Germany’s Wolfgang Voigt AKA Gas primary among them.
The intricacy of Panda Bear’s soundscaping, especially during a sequence like the beginning of “Take Pills,” where he fashions an oddball rhythm out of some sort of ASMR-ish viscerally appealing click-and-drop sample of this or that object or process, definitely recalls Delay in particular, and points up the specific threads of dub music these producers emphasized: its inwardness and contemplative values due to its general lack of vocals, or the role of its exploded sound and pace in unearthing the weirdly tangible qualities of certain repeated sounds, in particular ones manipulated to sound especially odd or vivid. By album’s ending, it’s clear that Panda Bear has synthesized this later tradition too, and is interested in making music to energize and calm the mind at the same time, music that will prove itself eventually as worthy both of foreground and background through its various drops, cuts, and tampered-with melodies.
Panda Bear really does love melodies—and harmonies—though, and his endeavors at recreating the most lovely contours of PET SOUNDS or SMILEY SMILE work wonderfully well on PERSON PITCH, and serve to restore to music inspired by dub its proper buoyancy and lift. Panda Bear’s resilient approach to melody AND his bona fides in the traditions of dub music production may best be exemplified in the back-to-back Tornados samples on the latter half of “Take Pills” and the first of “Bros”. The Tornados, who scored a #1 hit in the U.S. in 1962 with “Telstar,” were an entirely instrumental English rock group who played surf-y ‘60s “club music”—a novelty act by today’s standards. But Panda Bear fails to see them that way, and uses their resplendent strums to bolster bright but complex descending harmonies on “Take Pills” and then a tale of self-assertion on “Bros”. “Bros” devolves after a while into a juggling act of two samples vying greatly for supremacy, one of the most disorienting passages in a big-name indie pop song in the history of such things. The “phasing” technique which ensues, in which the two samples collide against each other at different intervals due to their divergent tempos, may have been a cop from famous New York minimalist composer Steve Reich, or may be considered just another defamialiarizing production technique in a palette of them, many surely borrowed from Jamaican producers. Either way, though, the beautiful mess wouldn’t resonate as strongly without Panda Bear’s dense weave of vocal harmonies to lift the day, the structure finally coming to make sense through a later revelation in form, the confusion revealed to have been as beautiful as it was all along.
Panda Bear’s jangling appropriation of dub, UK rock, and his own instincts as to how his voice might ride their beat the best is truly wide-ranging in its emotional scope and powerful in its structural insistence. Rather than just lopping off what he needed of their particular technical accomplishments, Panda Bear absorbed from these legendary musicians their inventive spirit, their will to challenge, their hope for a better day and their desire, through strange and glorious decisions made at all scales of the musical process, to be the first one to let us know how it will feel.
Five essential dub records:
Augustus Pablo - KING TUBBY MEETS ROCKERS UPTOWN
The Upsetters - SUPER APE
The Congos - HEART OF THE CONGOS
Harry Mudie - IN DUB CONFERENCE VOLUME ONE
Vladislav Delay - MULTILA
