Some People Listen to Dub in this City

Digitaldubs: dub in rio de janeiro

You know there’s just something about vaguely religious Jamaican speech echoing out into eternity over a thick bass line. Like listen to this: Bob Marley – “Keep On Moving (Extended Version Part II)”

This is dub. And last night, Carolina and I treated ourselves to an evening of magnificent dub in celebration of the 1st year anniversary of an awesome little club tucked away in the middle of Botafogo, far from the touristy clubs by the beach. I put pictures up here. The music was provided by a local collective called Digitaldubs that I became familiar with through a nice random email encounter.
A few years ago, I shared a dub-influenced Chemical Brothers song with the internet, but it wasn’t until about a month ago that, purely coincidentally, a guy here in Rio found my description of the Chemical Brothers song and decided to write me this email:

I was looking for more info on the track “If you kling to me I’ll klong to you” on Google and came across what you wrote at “Jeds of the week”. This one had gone mostly unnoticed to me, untill right now. The reason is because is DEEPLY, on the strict sense of the word, influenced by my favorite music style: dub.

So, if you are not familiar with it, try some digital stuff first, like Groove Corporation or Kruder and Dorfmeister. Then, move on to its roots, 70s reggae names such as King Tubby or Lee Perry.

What a thoughtful guy! Well, it turns out that he’s big on the dub scene here in Rio and even runs an online music magazine. He had no idea I was moving to Rio when he sent the email and I’m looking forward to meeting him soon. He couldn’t make it last night because he’s in Mexico.

Something about a big screen

Anyway, the dub was great and the whole evening was great because we started it off with a few sets of animated shorts at Anima Mundi 2005, an international animation film festival. I’m looking for a new place to live, so I’ve gotta go! More news soon.