INTERVIEW / REVIEW: Dubtribe Sound System, Bryant Street
(Jive Electro)
- Krisjanis Gale
Bryant Street does not hesitate to convey what Dubtribe Sound System is all about... really deep house incorporating a wide variety of musical influences which, at the very least, will have you shifting left-to-right in your office chair, and at best, moving and grooving all over your living room rug, full of zest for life.
The last bit can be taken wrongly as exaggeration, until you've actually heard this album.
Throbbing bass. Swishy cymbals. Speedy, eccentric, slap-happy congas, bongos, and other native skins. Deep, percussive organ riffs. Bubbly acidic synth basses. Floating flutes. Strings that surround you. And a life-loving groove that just does not let up once it's begun.
Lead founder-member clearly brought back tons of influence from his travels in Morocco, the Balearic islands, Mexico, the Yucatan Peninsula, and home-base San Francisco. This isn't just House music, and it certainly isn't just a group of DJs pawning themselves off as true musicians. This is what is means to open your eyes, ears, and heart to the whole world, take it all in, and reinterpret it via your own musical means. As a result, the work of Dubtribe is close to impossible to classify...except to say that it has lots to do with soul.
"Samba Dub," "No Puedo Estar Despierto," "Wednesday Night," "Loneliness in Dub," "Ain't Gonna Do You No Good," "Breeze", and "If You're Not Coming Back to Me" are the most infectious of the twelve tracks, which are at the same time both a retrospective look - at the Jazz of the 30's and 40's, the Disco and Funk of the 70's, and the groove-centric House of the late 80's - and a fast-forward to the collision of tribal musical forms (World music) and everything that came after it.
Best of all, the album is mixed like one of the many life sessions at which Dubtribe has continually proven themselves as the Harbingers of House... once you begin your journey upon this body of work, it's rather difficult to end it. So get a copy of Bryant Street, put it in your CD player, and lose yourself in the Dubtribe Sound System for an hour... or two... or three...
And now, a few words with Dubtribe Sound System...
Consumable: How would you describe your own music? I get a sense of soul-salsa-house while listening to Bryant Street.
Dubtribe (Sunshine Jones): A lot of folks have asked us about the Latin influence in our music from the last few years and I say this: dutribe means "tribal house music in dub" the name comes from the party we started in 1990 in San Francisco. We were musicians, not DJ's, and it was difficult for us to leave well enough alone, so we spun Latin, African, Brazillian and Middle Eastern records over the top of our drum machines and keyboards.
Eventually, we got a sampler and started to consolidate the whole experience. slowly folks caught on in our home town and we were a traveling electronic studio, after a few heavy trips across the US in a van we pared down the setup to a much smaller list of gear and nowadays we look more like a band than anything.
I would definitely say that the Latin influence on Bryant Street is strong, but by no means the end of the description. It's hard to resist the urge to pigeonhole us, but try it and you'll soon be wrong. San Francisco House music has never been about one style all night; it seems to me that the more diverse the DJ the better the response. We liked this a lot about our home town and brought it in as a seminal source in Dubtribe Sound System.
(Moonbeam Jones): House music is the foundation on which we lay all of the rhythmic influences you hear in our music; Latin, Soul, Disco, Tribal... as long as you can put a 4/4 kick drum under it, anything goes.
CO: Who are your main influences?
D (SJ): Some traditional influences including Herbie Hancock, Third World, King Tubby, Miles Davis, George Clinton; some house influences including Frankie Knuckles, Nu Groove, and the DJs from the late 80s / early 90s in San Francisco.
But mainly, we're most influenced/inspired by our peers... people out there unafraid to move ahead and force dance music to grow and change, to examine itself more deeply, to take itself more seriously. Like Keri Chandler, Joe Clauselle and our friends and family in San Francisco like Corey Black, Cosmic Jason, Onionz and the rest of the crew. We see these people as pushing house music forward from the inside, taking risks and opening avenues for everyone on the dance floor, in their living rooms and in their hearts and minds as well.
We don't approach the music from a "stomp, stomp, stomp" place. House is an art, like jazz, and 15 years into the movement I say we have arrived at a quantifiable force in the underground. people take the music as far away from the simplicity of a 4 on the floor groove as the will (and they WILL; see jungle, tech step, hardcore, drum and bass...) but it always comes back to house.
CO: What is the main philosophical driving force behind Dubtribe?
D (SJ): There's no easy way to answer that; I'll try to explain by way of a true story: it was 1988, I was in a suit. I felt pressure from all sides to proceed into a career in law or advertising. So I spent some time abroad, traveled a lot, ended up in Morocco. After a pretty sad trip there i went via hovercraft to the Balearic Islands (VERY different islands back then) and danced and danced in the tiny little clubs there. For the first time I heard all forms of music played together in a night held together by the four on the floor kick drum of house.
When I got back to San Francisco it was winter of 1990 and house and rave had just begun to happen there. I must admit I didn't care much for it right away. I missed the gay community's involvement in the dance scene and I really missed the soul influence in the music. So I started a group of people playing together, we made a jazzy kind of music more like a cross between massive attack. One night, I went to Osmosis (a San Francisco club) and my mind exploded. I finally heard something in the music i had been missing.
I went home and locked myself in the closet, wrote a set of music. Dubtribe was born.
Electronic music is just the music of the people in the US. It's definitely different in Europe and it's even beginning to change here, but for now and up until now house music has been our music, run by the people, developed and performed and presented independently in America. We have had so little help from the main men of money in the industry here. I'm proud of our movement and pleased with the ingenuity and progressive thinking we have devoted to the cause. Not everyone shares our personal politics, but if you're out there doing it for yourself, then you are our family in my eyes.
CO: Has your music always had a political vein? (as in "Holler!")
D (SJ): "Holler!" is my road to walk, a personal cross I needed to bear. At the end of 1995 we were done. It was effectively over for us. We were more popular and well traveled than ever, our price had quadrupled and we were miserable. Everywhere I looked I saw capitalism and greed. The movement I loved so much and had thrown any hope of an ordinary life away for had evapourated.
"Holler" became an ever changing tirade for me as a means of sharing my rage. as I worked through the rage it also became a message of resolution and a source of strength for me. A way of offering hope to everyone who felt burnt and bummed like me. Although we have reinvented ourselves entirely through imperial DUB and guidance records since then, I still felt like "Holler!" had a place on Bryant Street.
The message you interpret (as political), I say, comes from the listener. If they shrug and say "what a load of crap that peace and love thing is..." then I say that points back at THEM doesn't it? It tells me they have a lot more personal work to do, because we didn't say "peace" or "love" anywhere on the recording, only in the liner notes. you dig?
(MJ): Politics is just one of the "veins" through which we travel. We have many sides and moods; we are not all one thing. Pretty much whatever is on our minds comes out in our work.
CO: What is your favorite tracks on Bryant Street and why?
D (SJ): My favourite track on Bryant Street is "Breeze"; it's a song that came slowly for us. Initially it cleared the floor, coming after "Holler!" in the live set. We meant it to have a sort of cleansing effect on the whole room. After such a purging tirade, we wanted to help bring the vibe back around to a loving place. At that time, it seemed that a deeper energy was hard for the folks to get their heads around.
Eventually, "Breeze" became like a triumphant celebration for us at the end of the set. Really heavy and such a triumphant song now. Very inspiring.
