Deep Dive Dub

The Swiss musicians, Dub Spencer & Trance Hill, bow down low before space rock, but without bypassing pure dub. Deep Dive Dub shines with a precision that demands they be named in the same breath as the famous Swiss watches. Swiss timepieces are renowned for their precision, and they tick along nicely even under water - The mechanics, the cogs, the striking mechanism, the chronograph movements, the repeaters, the speed-up. Thank Dub Spencer & Trance Hill for the fact that the cantons of this maximum-precision country should produce ultra-chilled slo-mo dub like this, a style that has avid fans all over the world. The band are known for the formidable interior dynamism of their composition skills, their classic riddim craftsmanship, the psychedelic sound of their guitars, the pounding bass lines that approach infrasound levels, the space sounds and their grandiose sound dimensions. Like few other electronically influenced styles, over the years dub has shown itself impervious and resistant to all manner of short-lived trends. There are probably few people who - regardless of which music ghetto they inhabit - have not encountered dub at some point. On Deep Dive Dub, the band dives deeper than Jaques Piccard's team during their record-breaking dive in Trieste in the sixties. The focus of this repetition is the fusion of reggae, even though, instead of the lightness that is usually inherent in reggae, the album focuses on heavy grooves, grooves that drift off into fat, dark, mature places. With a hypnotic power, the musicians - all of whom are trained jazz instrumentalists - dive into a world of space-rock-dub-electro. On a couple of the tracks the band invited the Lucerne-based experimental vocalist Bruno Amstad (who has previously worked with John Zorn and Phil Minton) to contribute. Neither a slave to the great Jamaican heroes of the seventies nor lost in the great wide world of electronic dub, Dub Spencer & Trance Hill tread their own path, reducing and abstracting as they dive deeper and deeper.