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dustedmagazine · 5 years ago

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Listening Post: African Head Charge

African Head Charge conjured a potent variety of psychedelic dub, which blended the boom and echo of classic reggae production with intricate West African polyrhythms and sampled vocals from nearly every religion on earth. The band got started at the beginning of the 1980s as a partnership between producer Adrian Sherwood and the Jamaican percussionist Bonjo Iyabinghi Noah, but the five albums we are considering come from later on. Three are from the early 1990s and two after a decade-long hiatus that ended in the mid-aughts.

We come to this material through a reissued five CD (or five vinyl album) box set from On-U Sound, which collects four studio albums—the classic, career highpoint Songs of Praise (1990), the follow-up In Pursuit of Shashamane Land, a collection of alternate mixes, dubs and rarities from 1990 to 1993, Churchical Chant of the Iyabinghi and two later albums, 2005’s Vision of a Psychedelic Africa and Voodoo of the Godsent.

Jennifer Kelly: I am personally pretty gobsmacked by the first two albums, and the way they bring in hallucinatory chants from various regions of Africa and other places into the groove. For instance, I’m listening to “Cattle Herders Chant” from Songs of Praise right now, and it’s sort of magic how it brings together absolutely primitive, traditional singing into this technologically-enhanced dance beat. I mean, it’s very disco, very sensual, but also really spiritual. To me it gets to the links between religious transcendence and the kind of experiences you can have with music.

What are you guys hearing and liking in this set?

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Jonathan Shaw: I know so little about dub and reggae, but I really love this music. When I hear dub that I groove with, I think of William Gibson's Neuromancer, the Zionites and the constant throb of dub. Strange stuff to find in a science fiction novel about artificial intelligences — but that's the trick with dub. It's a blending of deeply spiritual sounds with the technological powers of the machine. The mixing board gets possessed by ghosts. Like on "Learned" from Churchical Chant of the Iyabinghi: there's a machine-like precision to the looped drum tracks that threatens to render the rhythms overly artificial, but when the voices cut in, there's a hair-raising weirdness that can only happen in the flesh, through the flesh.

Tim Clarke: Feels a little absurd to have never heard African Head Charge in the 25 or so years since I first noticed their name mentioned in issues of NME and Melody Maker that I used to read religiously during school break times. Dub reggae has never been my bag, which makes this collection a pleasant surprise. I approached the albums in an upside-down fashion, arbitrarily beginning with the outtakes collection, Churchical Chant of the Iyabinghi, simply by virtue of it being first alphabetically. As Jonathan mentioned, the juxtaposition between the loose religious chanting and the machine-like rhythmic loops is strikingly odd. I'm leaning towards favoring the rougher, dubbier cuts over the more easily digestible tracks. Either way, this is an unexpectedly toothsome feast — and one I'm still chewing my way through.

William Meyer: Sorry to be so long responding to this, but my, there’s a lot of African Head Charge to take in. I bought Songs of Praise at the time it came out and had a mixed response. While I never sold it, I never bought another record by the band. Listening to the record now, my opinion isn’t that different. I like the sound of the vocalist’s voice, and find the chanted delivery easy on the ears, but it doesn’t lure me in to actually listen to what he has to say. The big, bold 1990s drum programs didn’t sound good to me at the time, and they don’t sound good now. The hand drumming is much more engaging, and my interest corresponds to the extent that its patterns cover up the boom-thwack grooves.

I’ve gone through the subsequent albums in alphabetical rather than chronological fashion, and found that the cleaner the production, the more fusion-esque the bass solos, and the more sparkly the guitars sound, the less interested I am. The denser the layering of percussion and chants, the murkier the samples, and the more aggressive the dub effects are applied, the more I like it. So, I think that Visions of a Psychedelic Africa is great.

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Jonathan Shaw: Agreed that Visions... is the real find among these records--at least in my listening. I'm largely in accord with Bill's analysis of the sounds, but the sparkly guitars in "Surfari" are interesting to me. I hear in them a sort of a "fuck you" to the Beach Boys and their surfin' safaris, which replicate the colonial ventures of 19th-century white dudes in pith helmets. Rock and roll is a lot of things, and its pronounced tendency to leech vitality from black culture is one of the less attractive of those things. So it's fun to hear surf guitar runs subsumed into AHC's dubby weirdness.

"Unplanned" from that record is just terrific. A bit more spare, a bit more spaced out, lots of hand-drum sounds. Lots of semi-creepy weirdness.

Andrew Forell: I discovered Dub kinda accidentally after Mark Stewart left The Pop Group and started recording with Adrian Sherwood on On-U. African Head Charge’s first record My Life is a Hole in the Ground remains a favorite. Of these rereleases Songs of Praise is the only one I’d previously heard and i agree with Jen that it’s a remarkable combination of the sacred and profane. But I have to say that the two latter albums Visions of a Psychadelic Africa & Voodoo of the Godsent are the records that have really excited me on first, and subsequent listens. I get what Bill’s saying about the 1990s drum programs, sparkly guitars and fusion bass solos and agree there are times when they become a distraction but when it works on Visions and Voodoo i find it pretty irresistible. I’ve always found Sherwood to be a producer sympathetic to the source material no matter how much he’s deconstructing, reconstructing and generally mucking it around and i think the application of dub techniques to African polyrhythms a nice closing of the circle between reggae’s roots and Sherwood’s continuation (some might say appropriation) of Jamaican innovators like Lee “Scratch’ Perry and King Tubby. Adding space and bottom end to hand drums and chants makes, at least for me, compelling listen.

Ben Donnelly: Dub is inherently about the character of the production, isn't it? Along with psychedelia, it's the first manifestation of the studio as a pop instrument. And uniquely, it's the first form where existing recordings are the main source of sound. So, if the sheen or the haze of one of these records isn't working, there's not much further one can be expected to delve.

I first encountered African Head Charge in the rotation bin of my college radio station, midnight shift in 1987. I'm not sure which LP I was slapping on the turntable, but a combo of giddy fatigue and typography fixed the band's name in my mind as African Head *Change*. In the context of the era that misconstrued name fit with the tribal industrial stuff that was also in rotation, like Dissidenten, Test Department, Flux and so on, with more than a few of them also Adrian Sherwood productions.

To contemporary ears, Songs of Praise is coming from a place that's passe. The digital sharpness of the sampling and percussion, and the travelogue of the sources no doubt inspired to the sort of world-music-trance-techno that you'd find on a compact disc in the checkout line at a food coop in the mid-90s, with that "global village coffeehouse" artwork.

So, I start cringing when the chanting children launch "Hymn," yet the rhythm track is still off kilter enough to delight me. And this keeps happening to me as I approach this album in 2020 - those Afropop leads that became corny signifiers used to sell Fruitopia break free of their 90s appropriations, and I can hear them as the more thoughtful juxtapositions they originally were.

The more recent albums, *Visions* and *Voodoo* have a cloudier surface, more like something that came from Lee Perry's Black Ark studio. While that Upsetter sound is now the standard we use to measure dub, *Songs of Praise* was created in a time when the terms "dub" and "version" were thrown around much more freely, e.g. U2's "Celtic Dub Remix."

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The latter records also arrived out in a time when their influence was fully felt, as Hyperdub and Hotflush were defining dubstep and UK bass. I'm struck at how the basic AFC formula of hand drums and queasy vocal samples defines the boundaries Shackleton has spent his career richly exploring.

Bill Meyer: Michael Veal wrote a swell book that takes on the question of what dub is, and what it was. It started out as a way to skimp on money, reusing the backing track for the b-side instead of coming up with new b-side, and went from there. Sheen came into the game when digital means of recording replaced analogue in Jamaica, and when the dub influence started to spread around the world. Adrian Sherwood has made a life’s work of inserting dub consciousness and methods into places where it previously was not present. But the influence went both ways, and the mainstream drum sounds and late 20th century treble overload has a lot to do with me rating the 1990s Headcharge lower than Vision of a Psychedelic Africa.

Sometimes the slickness works as contrast, though. Ex: the clash between cocktail piano and the pitched-down command to “smoke up your collyweed” on “Take Heed…And Smoke Up Your Collyweed” is pretty cool.

Ben Donnelly: It's very appealing how many of these tracks can be simultaneously ridiculous and ominous. The track later on Voodoo of the Godsent built around the sample of the newscaster voice repeating "Undulating to atonal music while experiencing way out trances" made me think it must be a 1990s track, as that sort of campy sample went out of fashion at the end of the century. That it is from 2011 is charming. These records are definitely burnished by removing them from the flow of decades and treating them as their own backwater.

Bill Meyer: Yeah, the coexistence of ridiculousness and dark portent may actually give this stuff life outside of its time. Sometimes I hear African Head Charge and wonder what an Adrian Sherwood-Prince Far I match-up would have sounded like. But instead of Prince Far I, who sounded like the only thing he read was the Old Testament, I imagine these guys kick back and watch a bit of cable TV in between takes. It’s more a part of the world than Prince Far I sounded like he was, even though at the same time it imagines an alternate, psychedelic African universe.

Ian Mathers: As someone who's a big fan of dub in general, from Lee "Scratch" Perry's first attempts to replicate the sound of dropping a pebble down an old dry, metal well as a kid (or is that story apocryphal?) to, well, Adrian Sherwood's noble crusade to apply dub techniques wherever they even sort of fit, it's kind of surprising (I still stand by his Echo Dek dub of Primal Scream's Vanishing Point record, especially the "Stuka" dubs), it's kind of surprising I hadn't gotten around to searching out African Head Charge material yet; honestly, if I'd known it was less of a solo outing for Sherwood and had heard anything about Bonjo I (a really compelling performer, on the basis of these records), I might have sped up the process a little. But in any case, I was thrilled to have the excuse when we decided to tackle these reissues, and I'm glad I did — at worst for me these are totally pleasant, and at best genuinely revelatory.

I do agree at least to some extent on the general take here on Songs of Praise and the other material from around then; not all of it has dated super well, although the slightly more out there versions found on Churchical Chant of the Iyabinghi are among my favorite tracks here. It's interesting to see how their influence has made it through to some unexpected places; when I hit play on "Peace and Happiness" from that compilation, I might have believed me if you'd told me this was a TV on the Radio deep cut. Even with Songs of Praise, at least this version with the bonus tracks, has some unexpected range; finding something as solidly dubby as "Full Charge" a track down from the more traditionally arranged "Deer Spirit Song" is an interesting contrast.

But I do also agree that Vision of a Psychedelic Africa is a more potent example of African Head Charge's whole thing, especially when they start doing that thing where they sequence songs and their dubs right next to each other ("Run Come See"/"Ran Come Saw", "Blessed Works"/"Work Blessed", and so on). What particularly intrigued me when I started looking into the band was the whole notion of "psychedelic" dub (even though I know my tastes in psychedelia are narrower than my tastes in dub) and a lot of this record and Voodoo of the Godsent pretty much nails what I was hoping for when I saw that genre tag. It's not that the earlier records are necessarily bad, just that something like In Pursuit of Shashamane Land's "No, Don't Follow Fashion" or "Pursuit" feels more like just dub (or maybe some sort of dub fusion thing). I'll still need to give these more listens to decide exactly how much I feel the need to keep around, but things are looking for the new records and Churchical Chant of the Iyabinghi at least.

Jonathan Shaw: I'm not conversant with the band's evolution, so it's tough to track the changing currents and differing emphases when there's so much music to take in, and so much I'm hearing for the first time. But I think it's so good, so pleasurable and powerful. I really dig the big vocal gestures at the beginning of Songs of Praise. "Free Chant" sounds like a drum circle in the middle of a tent revival meeting. That devotional vibe gets amplified by the opening seconds of "Orderliness, Godliness, Discipline, and Dignity," though the flavor of those voices singing "He that followeth me..." scans a whole lot whiter to my ears. So, when the dubby stuff and the toasting abruptly cut in, the shift has an effect that's both jarring and comic. The rest of "Orderliness..." is just terrific: the squalling, rasping guitar noise, the zooming and glistening noises.

Andrew Forell: Totally agree on the Echo Dek/Vanishing Point comparison (and as a sidebar - what Andrew Weatherall - RIP - did with Screamadelica for Primal Scream as another example as studio as instrument) as an example of both the dub production template and what Sherwood’s vision can bring to source material. I really like AHC’s music but the excitement for me is listening to what the collaborative process produces. Oddly, I was never really into reggae, but dub made a lot of sense to me. The emphasis on the bass and the space and particularly the fracturing of the original track was like listening to Charlie Parker or Coltrane break down a popular song, play with the melody, interpolate quotations from other songs, do something completely new and then bring it all back to the source, which took me a while to ‘get’ when I started really listening outside the punk/postpunk etc. guitar based realm, but which thrilled me just as much as when I first heard bands like The Pop Group & The Birthday Party who seemed to be deconstructing the classic rock I grew with on the AM radio.

Ian Mathers:

Absolutely agree about favoring dub over reggae, I think mostly because of those studio-as-instrument reasons you give. When I do find a reggae record I like, I really like it (I'm far from alone in saying this, but The Congos' Heart of the Congos is one of the most transcendent records ever made), whereas any basically well-done dub I'm happy to throw on and listen to. To divert just a bit further before bringing it back to these albums specifically, I personally also found dub very comfortable when I first actually heard it because the use and style of bass specifically was familiar; I grew up listening to, among other things, an Ontarion indie band called King Cobb Steelie, whose Junior Relaxer�� was kind of a hybrid between lots of the echo-y guitar stuff I already loved and more dub-informed percussion and bass. I wouldn't say any of the tracks were full on dubs, but I still find a track like "Rational" astonishing, and for me personally definitely a gateway.

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I don't just mention that because Junior Relaxer is still a favorite of mine and I tell people about it whenever I can, though; to me it's another sign as these African Head Charge albums are of the near-infinite mutability and capability of dub. I wouldn't diminish it by saying it's just a production technique, it's more a particular mindset or way of approaching the elements of a track, which may be why I remember seeing the descriptor "dubwise" appended to lots of stuff that didn't strictly fit the criterion. Sherwood has always had a very dubwise sensibility, whether it's expressed here in as... classical(?) a sense as in Churchical Chant of the Iyabinghi's "Dervish Dub" or as radiantly offbeat as Vision of a Psychedelic Africa's "Dobbyn Joins the Head Charge" (both of which have been favorites for me as I keep listening to these).

Shrunken Head by African Head Charge

Ben Donnelly: I generally don't get much from ambient styles of music, but dub works for me as both wallpaper and object d'art. That can make it a challenge to write about. I really appreciate Lee Scratch Perry's recent life-summary work with Sherwood, but I'm surprisingly tolerant of his work a decade ago with passable Euro-dub players, or his bizarre live-date configuration backed by American stoners. I'm almost suspicious of my own judgement as I ease into the haze of dub this satisfying.

This also makes it difficult to compare to other forms with Jamaican origins. Dub's development has happened independent of the subsequent flow of reggae. Contemporary roots reggae is as irritating as underwear made of hemp burlap. Dancehall is frequently genius and even more frequently tossed off filler. Folding dub back towards contemporary Jamaican music is an effort mostly made by outsiders - The Bug and Santigold with notable successes. And there's the increasingly strange legacy of dubstep as something with more DNA from to Nine Inch Nails than King Tubby.

If I was going to narrow down AHC to one idea, it would be “Dervish Chant/Dervish Dub.” The found vocals syncopate almost telepathically with the big beat, and the conga drum rhythm line sounds human and electronic at the same time. The components are alien to 1970s reggae, yet the whole feels like a direct descendant.

Mason Jones: Totally a side note, but I was so surprised to see King Cobb Steelie mentioned that I had to reply. Back when SubArachnoid Space was touring, we did a pass through Canada and played a couple of shows with those guys, right after Junior Relaxer came out. They were super-nice, incredibly stoned people, and I really enjoyed their shows. Playing that stuff live, complete with a Space Echo, was even better than the albums. They got the dub-rock-experimentation thing down really well.

Bill Meyer: While the making of dub is studio-dependent, it was originally presented as public, social music. Aside from buying singles (which a lot of Jamaican music fans could not afford), people heard the music at drinking establishments that used sound systems to lure people in. They heard it played at enormous volume, so that it was felt as well as heard. Sound systems used exclusive material, including dubs, to bring people in. I'm not sure that it was considered to be separate from reggae; it was one of part the music.

Ben Donnelly: Yeah, that's my understanding- in a way dub becomes its own genre as it becomes a separate pursuit in the UK. Once you get to the Sleng Teng riddim in the 1980s, anything without an electronic beat isn't danceable enough for the sound systems in the homeland, parallel to how house and techno displaced funk drumming in the same era.

It is already half a decade old, but my favorite contemporary Jamaican take on dub I've heard is Aidonia's "Ganja Farmer", and the dub takes were mostly done overseas, as best as I can tell.

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Big stars like Popcaan seem to start dabbling in dub once their reach is international, but not as they're competing for attention.

That's part of what's interesting at looking at these African Head Charge records in retrospect. The form isn't there to slap you around — it risks dissipating in a cloud of smoke well-worn tropes. I don't know that I'd have picked Visions of a Psychedelic Africa out of a promo list when it was first released. It may well have come through Dusted channels without anyone thinking it was worth seizing upon.

Ian Mathers: Mason, I'm super glad someone else can report that King Cobb Steelie were great - I didn't get to see them until they were playing shows for the album after Junior Relaxer (they were my first interview for the university newspaper, and super nice guys, as well as incredible live) but my experience was very much the same. They did a reunion show a little while back, don't think it came to any new music but that Space Echo was still going strong.

The sound system thing is so fascinating to me, especially knowing it was novelty that was often a draw, and especially knowing that as a result the systems were often eager to get their hands on dubplates of pretty much anything that seemed like it'd be hot with the crowd — if my memory of the reading I've done is correct, that's where dub got its name, although given that what we now think of dub was far from the only type of production found on those dubplates that were being sneaked and smuggled around, I'm not sure why it stuck that way.

As someone who tends to keep playing the same dub albums rather than keeping up with what the sound is (or isn't, I guess?) doing, I really appreciate some of the more recent context (that Aidonia is great), as well as the reminder that although the roots of the form were definitely Jamaican, a decent amount of the codification/plaudits/etc. come from overseas. It makes me wonder at what cross-pollination does occur — there's ambient dub techno, of course, a form I love but will happily admit is an acquired taste for many, but I also to what extent, say DJ Screw was thinking about dub when he started making Chopped & Screwed versions of songs. Different audiences (on different perception-altering substances, possibly), but it feels like there's a kinship there.

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Jonathan Shaw: Thanks for the context, Bill. I've certainly been playing AHC really, really loud.

Ben's notion of the Dervish resonates. I've been listening to some noise projects (Herukrat, Koufar) that invoke Islamic devotional music and call-to-prayer as potent figures of resistance to Western modernity. It's spiritual music, and it's interested in summoning very heavy presences; not didactically political, but vibrating with an intensity that has a political register. I don't know a heck of a lot about Rastafarianism, but it seems a sort of liberation theology. I've responded to the AHC music that's most in tune with those impulses. "Healing Ceremony" on Songs of Praise feels that way to me: the blossoms of synth sound want to brighten the track, but the distended, fucked-up tone of the guitar solo renders that problematic. And those voices, wailing and electro-fried. The song may heal, but the wounds feel pretty livid.

#dusted magazine #listeningpost #african head charge #on-u sound #dub #reggae #adrian sherwood #Bonjo Iyabinghi Noah #jennifer kelly #jonathan shaw #bill meyer #ben donnelly #andrew forell #tim clarke #ian mathers #mason jones

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