WOEBOT

Crusties laugh last.

World Domination Enterprises: “Lets Play Domination”.

For me that’s the pinnacle of anarcho-squat artistry. This 1988 LP popped recently into my head by way of personal recollection of hustling my way backstage to meet The Doms in the late eighties. It’s cover, a boardroom style montage of the band in acid-house neon, was put together by artist Slim Smith. Maybe a pseudonym derived from the Studio One crooner, either way squarely hinting at the perennial adherence to Reggae of those folk with dogs on strings. I actually saw a show of Slim Smith’s at a squat warehouse art happening in Camden a few years later. Low Production values were in evidence.

I’m in no way trying to kick start the “blissed-out” revival by foisting this on you. That’s the league of A.R.Kane, Loop and My Bloody Valentine that, yes, Reynolds was championing back-in-the-day, although if my memory serves me correctly Simon had World Dom pegged as “Arsequake” his brilliant coterie of artists employing sphincter-rupturing bass frequencies, top of the chart being, natch, The Butthole Surfers. Indeed, I’m gonna remind him here (he’s such a tirelessly voracious modernist that I bet he never checks his back-pages) that he once reviewed a live show World Dom did at a tube station. I think I dropped my rattle after reading the review.

Actually this record is the Grandaddy of the kind of squat Jungle/Ardkore/Ragga mash-up practised by DJ Scud and his crew (check last years Roots, Rock, Ravers EP) and now The Bug (Kevin Martin’s avant-ragga record which this piece is also an arse-about-tit review of). Lets Play Domination was light years ahead of it’s time. Sure there were other crusties on the dub tip, the awful Rhyth-mites (way too straight a reading fellows) and if you went to On-U gigs you found the audience was 95% white rastas drinking cider; but World Dom deep-fried their riddims in white noise till the edges went crispy, taking the Metal Box template and stripping the P.I.L. collage of any ironic post-modernism, serving it up as headfuck noize for its own sake. Actually maybe they had more common with The Ruts, more straight-forward barrelling. That’s just what Scud does, yunnuh mash-up the place to mentasm-tastic bad ass bass.

There’s a hell of a lot more to the record than dub. Lots of covers got fed into the blender, U.Roy’s “Jah Jah call you”, L.L.Cool J’s “I can’t live without my Radio” (my secret party trick is that I can deliver this whole track, stand me on the table with the salt and pepper and make me sing for my supper) and Lipps Inc’s ace “Funkytown”. However unlike Will and Gareth, Keith Dobson could also pen crackers like Asbestos Lead Asbestos. But mainly it’s the SOUND. Denatured disembowled grumbling out-of-tune bass, skeetering rattling rolling drums all topped with post-Gang-of-Four/Chic ice cold chicken-scratch feedback guitar. Naturally Keith’s troubled vocals got lashings of echo, though listen to the studio masters (no I haven’t……….yet) and you still can’t understand entirely what he’s saying, he’s gargling mice. They did a live dub LP after this “Love from Lead City”, which my bro had a copy of.

Which brings me to The Bug’s “Pressure”, in which I detect a touch of the free-festival. Firstly check John Eden’s great interview with Kevin here. Straight up I like the fact that Martin is totally aware that this is NOT a real ragga record. Indeed the cast of chatters is (to be very cruel) a bunch of “renta-raggas”. I used to have that Daddy Freddy/Asher D LP on Profile and also the Daddy Freddy LP in red and yellow (matched the wall-paper). Freddy had the reputation of being the fastest ragga chatter in the world at one stage. That’s like Alvin Lee of Ten Year’s After being the celebrated as the fastest guitarist in the world. Completely missing the point. Daddy Freddy was always a fusioneer, never really a chatter from the yard. His other fusion stuff? Well he did Daddy Freddy’s Echo Chamber with Beats International (Norman Cook’s pre-Fatboy Slim outfit) which I used to play out pre-ragga-jungle, I used to like that track. Though even then (and actually I wince when I admit this, cos it shows what an absolutely pathetic hipster I was even then) I tippexed the Beats International logo off the front of the 12” ha, ha. He also contributed to the Mango Volume 2 Ragga Hip-Hop record. Well Freddy’s up for this project with Kevin, and I think (uncruelly) he’s well cut out for the job because clearly Martin needed to rely on open-minded contributors. The others, Roger Robinson, Toastie Taylor, Paul St.Hilaire, Wayne Lonesome etc I’ve never heard of. This is because no-one has heard of them. But they do a bloody good job. Apparently Martin’s got something lined up with Cutty Ranks (giggle at John going “Fuck!”), but in truth Cutty’s vocal chords are like spent knicker elastic these days (though I wouldn’t say that to his face, wink). I bet the Cutter is more open to UK producers than most, after all his massive “Stopper” was the work of the UK-based Fashion imprint.

The real point is that AT LAST someone has had the guts and brains to do a Ragga influenced record. Shit I was gonna have to roll up my sleeves, get personal with Pro-Tools and record my own bloody one. See we’ve had (since P.I.L’s Metal box in 1979) nearly 25 years of art rock influenced by reggae and not a single attempt to get to grips with Ragga. And you know what a lot of that fake Reggae has been bloody brilliant, and doesn’t in the least detract from the original. Kev’s riddims are extremely interesting, and he’s totally upfront about them not being “for real”. I’m only hammering away at this because this is the first hurdle suckers are gonna have to leap. He’s actually grasped how Ragga’s rhythmic inflection differs from Reggae’s. Well done mate.

While I’m trying to draw a line between this and the World Dom record, the best tracks on Pressure are actually not in-yer-face at all, but rather quiet, nodding and slinky. There’s a strong influence here of the Rhythm & Sound Tikiman stuff. Tikiman was also another “renta-ragga” and those 10’ EPs differed by sticking to digi-dub as a rhythmic template, but you know what, I loved them. It’s a hipster’s escape clause to say something works better as something else (Undie as Art-Rock, etc) but when the artist in question (ex- God rocker and the perpetrator of Techno-Animal’s Re-Entry) is clearly a bit of an old shapeshifter then I think it’s excusable. So here it is the best Techno record you’re gonna hear all year.

Posted by Woebot at May 4, 2003 01:07 PM