Graham Dunning

Last week I came across a paper by Bahadırhan Koçer, Noise as a Spectre in Dub Techno, which I was excited to read as it resonates with my interests and current reading for the PhD. I made a youtube playlist of 48 of the 50 tracks Koçer mentions in the paper, which makes for an enjoyable overview of the genre across 20 years, tied together through use of noise as a compositional element in each piece.

Ghostliness and the spectral have deep associations with dub music already, with one of the proposed etymologies for ‘dub’ relating to the Jamaican patois term ‘duppy’ for a ghost or wandering spirit. Lee Scratch Perrry has described dub as ‘the ghost in me coming out’; there’s something necromantic about making music from recorded sound (like Edison’s capturing of the voices of the dead). Dub’s sound to me is both cosmic and earthly: the spaces it conjures through delay, reverb, hiss and disembodied/truncated vocalisations are fictions, virtual spaces of the imagination. Grubby and grotty like the scarier side of an acid trip, tangled in rainbow-glinting cobwebs. For me, the hiss and noise of 70s dub is an essential element as much as the more deliberate sonic effects. It’s not just the repetition of the delay, but the way it distorts with each filtered repeat. Turn up the decay.

The main argument of Koçer’s paper is to bring dub techno under the hauntology umbrella, through the use of various noise sources to reflect themes of urban decay, lost futures and the spectre of the past resurected. It’s clear there’s similar stuff going on with dub techno to Mark Fisher’s favourites Burial and The Caretaker. The origin for the inclusion of noise, according to the interviews cited by Koçer seems (appropriately) more organic and less of a deliberate reference, basically arising from the use of analogue audio equipment in some of the early pieces which laid the groundwork for defining the genre. Later examples use elements of noise in a much more conscious way, as the textural aspect became a key signifier of the genre.

Koçer’s knowledge of and enthusiasm for the genre comes across throughout, nonmoreso in the playlist table which lists a type of noise used within each track. I was pariculaly interested in the choice of classifications, including ‘static’ for types of tape hiss, record crackle, and identifying various field recordings as noise. I’ve been thinking about ways in which noise can be tapped as a textural element, the extent to which process matters (VST tape plugins vs actually recording to tape), Fisher’s writing on record crackle coming from sampled audio, and whether these sounds included deliberately in a composition can still even be called ‘noise’ at all. Every sound in a recording signifies something, and the way it’s treated can potentially clarify or obscure the processes used, the artist’s intentions and the context of the rest of the elements.

Lots to think over, for now I’m enjoying digging into the music.

Links:

Paper: https://dj.dancecult.net/index.php/dancecult/article/view/1251

Playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLe81Xpl55VG4qF71OPw1PuhoIqeuAZqmA