Music Arcades: Various: Ambient Dub Volume 3

I was going to say that these dance/experimental crossover compilations were a passing fad of the mid-nineties. Then I realised that they may have been just a passing fad for me — see also Macro Dub Infection (which prompted exactly the same thought 30 months ago), Incursions in Illbient, Ripples of Dub — but maybe they've continued in an unbroken stream ever since.

"Ambient Dub"… you see, it seems so enticing at first. We know Brian Eno drew on early dub reggae for his studio experimentation, so what a great idea to reunite these two strands. But then, think about it some more — after listening to this album — and there's something of the oxymoron about it. Ambient being a craft of layering sounds such that figure and ground keep shifting. Dub being a matter of taking what was previously ground — the bass and incidental sounds — moving them to the front, and keeping them there. The emphasis on rhythm in dub just doesn't allow it to float like good ambient music does.

To contradict or at least moderate myself, there probably is an area of overlap area where sounds gradually morph and change. However the mostly unimaginative tracks on this compilation don't make much of it.

Meanwhile, I'm horrified to spot correspondences that I'm sure I never noticed 15 years or so ago when I got to know this album. I could perhaps forgive myself for missing the heavy reference to Ode to Billy Joe in Choctaw Ridge (a giveaway title), since I didn't have any Bobby Gentry back then. But how did I miss that Groove Corporation's Your Heart borrows so clearly from A.R.Kane?

Or does it? I went back to i to check exactly what track it was that they'd picked over, and, while it might be Snow Joke, I couldn't say for certain. Still, it was good to be reminded of an act that really knew how to repurpose dub imaginatively.