King Tubby Meets Rockers UptownAugustus Pablo

On King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown, the record isn't the song — it's the mix. Drop the needle on the title track and within seconds the sound starts to move: the drums vanish and reappear an instant later wrapped in reverb, the bass is left alone and enormous in the centre, a guitar enters and is already swallowed by echo. This is a dub of Jacob Miller's Baby I Love You So, and you aren't hearing a song mixed well — you're hearing the mixing as the song.

That's the whole thesis of the album: the mixing desk becomes an instrument. In his studio in Waterhouse, Kingston, King Tubby didn't touch up a finished track — he re-played it. With the faders he dropped instruments out and back in on the beat, threw the voice and the snare into a spring reverb, stretched a syllable into a delay that bounced until it disappeared, cut frequencies with the EQ until a song was reduced to its bass-and-drum skeleton. The near-unbelievable part is that he did all this on a two-track desk: no automation, no memory, just very fast hands and an idea of composition. This is the producer-engineer becoming an author — the exact opposite of the notion that dub is a by-product of a vocal cut.

The other half of the sound is Pablo's melodica. A near-toy instrument, in theory; in his hands, a melancholy minor-key voice the Jamaicans named the "Far East sound" — an Eastern, almost Middle-Eastern air that carried into reggae a sadness that hadn't belonged to it. On Each One Dub and 555 Dub Street it's that melodica that holds the emotional thread while Tubby dismantles everything around it. The rhythms were played by first-rank musicians — Robbie Shakespeare and Aston "Family Man" Barrett on bass, Carlton Barrett on drums — recorded by Errol Thompson at Randy's before the tapes reached Tubby's desk.

If you had to name a single record that stands for the peak of dub, the shortlist gets short fast, and this one is always on it. There's no need to retell the genre's history here — that's another page's job — but it's enough to say that without the meeting of Pablo and Tubby much of the music that followed would sound different: the remix as an art form, house, rave, and — ever since John Lydon played it on British radio in 1977 — a piece of post-punk. This is 1976 dub that has kept coming out of speakers for fifty years.

On vinyl the hunt is serious. The absolute original is the Jamaican pressing on Pablo's own Yard label: rare, expensive, a grail that runs into the several hundreds of euros when it surfaces. The pressing that carried the album beyond Jamaica is the American Clocktower (catalogue CT-0085 / CTLP-085), also collectible and easier to find. And there's a quirk of this title to know: on many pressings the tracklists printed on labels and sleeves are wrong, and the number and order of tracks shift from edition to edition — some add a version of Satta Massagana at the end, some drop it, and the Shanachie reissue even swapped one track for another. Don't be fooled by the print: always check matrices and credits. To simply listen, there are honest reissues — Greensleeves and above all the carefully done Japanese Dub Store editions — that do the record justice without collector money. Before buying, the Discogs entry is the map through dozens of versions: we earn nothing by linking it, which is exactly why it's here.

King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown is the other face of the same island. Our Trojan Records reportage tells how reggae conquered the British charts; this record tells what was happening, in the same years, inside a Kingston studio, where reggae became laboratory art. If you want to hunt it in person, our guide to reggae and dub in London says where the Jamaican pressings turn up. From here the dub island continues: Burning Spear and Marcus Garvey, Culture and Two Sevens Clash, Lee Perry's Black Ark, Scientist's experiments. But it starts here — with the record in which a man at a mixing desk proved that the studio doesn't record music: it makes it.