MAD PROFESSOR feat BLONDUB SEXY SOUND

Neil Fraser built his first radio at the age of eight. Strange kid who liked electronics and not football. Mad Professor, they called him. Pockets of resistance. Islands of resistance. Born in Guyana in the West-Indies, moved to live with his father in London when he was thirteen. Life in the city, growing up, the light in shop-windows, the repression. He hears the music born of experiments placed on the B-sides of old Jamaican 45-singles, originally used only to test sound-levels.

B-sides by King Tubby 1976. Echoes, reverb - Builds his own studio, broke. Builds phaser, reverb, echoes, delay. A city. Machines, obsession. Two-thumb-Ampex, 24-track analogue mixer, DAT-recorder. Big machines, like construction-machines, heavy lorries blowing past in the night. Doppler-sirens -

Mad Professors indie-label Ariwa Sound rapidly became one of Britain’s most influential. He has worked with Pato Banton, Wild Bunch, Macka B, U-Roy, Yellowman, Lee ’Scratch’ Perry, Sade, KLF, Rancid... Mad cuts and dices, building it anew, screwing, thinking, blending. His altered version of Massive Attack’s Protection, called No Protection, outsold the original.

Elephant-of-war-bass-sound, glistening, electronic cities that whisper, hiss, boom. Light. Neon. London.

Fill in all the blanks. Voice-fragments, beaches of sound. Anti-London. Noise.

Big, living trees, enormous, dark, with thousands of leaves. Thick roots that twine and coil, down in the darkness. Mad Professor now stands side by side with Scratch and King Tubby, one of the dub-legends. The wind that blows down there, underground.

Bleep! Wheee! Swoosh -

Distortion - change. The album Black Liberation Dub from the nineties, with Louis Farrakhan’s voice booming like a ghost across computer-generated landscapes. Melancholy. Freedom. Rhythm, metal, alloys. Isolated copper-wires, diodes, transistors. Sparks.

Voice fading again, only sounds left. Bom-bom-bwam-bwam-bwam-bom, doo-doo-doo-duuung-duung. You know that it’s in there, inside your head, even with no words. The age of psychological warfare. ”You should build something small every day,” Mad Professor says in an interview.

”It’s about getting inside, to where there aren’t any words.”

The silence.

Johannes Anyuru