For the love of dub

SELF-STYLED ‘synth junkie’ Patrick Devaney, aka Citizen- X, has a new digital EP out – Strange Dubs.

‘It came about after playing the song Area 51 in dub from my last album, Who Are We?, live at The Doghouse in March,’ he said.

‘That track had been inspired by attending the Don Letts DJ set at St James in 2021. It had re-awakened my love of dub and Jamaican rhythms.’

In 1994, Pat, together with Ian De La Mare, played in the band Dance On Glass.

‘We were influenced by those rhythms and I enjoyed playing Area 51 so much that I went back to some tracks from Who Are We?, plus some of my single releases, and decided to try to remix them in the same style. To my surprise, quite a few worked with the dub rhythms, so I kept on going.’

For the uninitiated, dub is an electronic musical style that grew out of reggae in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is commonly considered a sub-genre of reggae, though it has developed to extend beyond that style. Generally, dub consists of remixes of existing recordings created by significantly manipulating the original, usually through the removal of vocal parts, emphasis of the rhythm section, the application of studio effects such as echo and reverb, and the occasional dubbing of vocal or instrumental snippets from the original version or other works.

‘Dub was pioneered by recording engineers and producers such as Osbourne “King Tubby” Ruddock, Lee “Scratch” Perry, Errol Thompson and others,’ said Pat.

Dub is often said to represent the human mind affected by a significant dose of cannabis. (Also a ‘dub’ of weed in the late-40s US was slang for $20-worth).

‘It’s one of those things that dub has, and continues to be associated with, weed smoking,’ said Pat. ‘And that harks back to its Jamaican roots. In the post-punk days and the early 80s, dub was a hugely popular underground movement. Many artists would produce dub versions of their albums, such as UB40, Bill Laswell, Jah Wobble, The Ruts, as well as spoken word artists like William Burroughs and Linton Kwesi Johnson.

‘The On-U Sound label was also very influential, with their roster of artists including Adrian Sherwood, Tackhead and Mark Stewart.’

Pat explained his process for Strange Dubs.

‘To create the dub mixes I went back to multi tracks and stripped them down, changing the rhythm and bass tracks, stripping out some of the original synth parts and replacing them with dub reggae style guitar chops, organ stabs, clavinet, drum and percussion hits and speech samples.

‘It’s in no way supposed to be authentic dub music, more a homage, taking influences from bands such as Dreadzone and The Orb.’

• Citizen-X – Strange Dubs is available at citizen-x.bandcamp.com/album/strange-dubs for £5. Also streaming for free on Spotify and Apple Music. To find out more about future releases, gigs, etc, www.facebook.com/citizenx100.