Ambient Dub

 VARIOUS ARTISTS

AMBIENT DUB: VOLUME 3 (Beyond)

Melody Maker, 1995? 

     'Ambient dub' - it sounds like a triffic idea, doesn't it? But, as with jazz-funk and funk-metal, too often it turns out to be a fusion of the worst of both genres, not the best. For post-Orb ambient dub, that means tons of meaninglessly daft echo FX and stereophonic tomfoolery (dub) combined with pious, 'angelic' synth-vapour (ambient).

     There were patches of great promise on the first two volumes of Beyond's series, in particular the contributions of Original Rockers (esp. "The Underwater World Of Jah Cousteau") and The Higher Intelligence Agency (esp. "Ketamine Entity"). And on Vol. 3, it's these units that shine again. H.I.A.'s "Delta" is spacey and spooky, while Original Rockers' "Mecca Of Space" starts like the ghost of a Barry White epic, then mutates into something like a dubbed-up version of Talking Heads' "Drugs".

     As for the rest, it's less a case of Eno-meets-Prince Far I, more like Jean Michel Jarre teaming up with Andy Weatherall on an off-night. At their best, ambient and dub conjure a sense of space: sacrosanct and immense, with dub, uncanny or hauntingly elegaic, with ambient. Most of the tracks here evoke only the virtual space of the MIDI/portastudio interface; this music smells clinical and hygienic, not ambrosial. For instance, so sterile and eometrically plotted is Banco De Gaia's "Desert Wind" it makes me think of computer graphics rather than the denuded majesty of the Gobi.

     Save your pennies for full-fledged LP's by Original Rocker and Higher Intelligence Agency. The rest is soporific stuff, strictly for spliffheads.