Released last year, “Pour qui sonne le dub”, Dubamix’s second album, landed like a cobblestone in a pond, or rather a cobblestone on the barricade. A collage of samples mixing extracts from speeches, news flashes, Jamaican riddims and classical works, but also Gypsy music, French chanson and American folk, “Pour qui sonne le dub” comes with a radical message rare on the French scene. While he is currently composing music centred on women, we caught up with Greg, Dubamix’s composer, about this UFO.
Setting yesterday’s struggles alongside today’s fights is the ambition of Dubamix, founded by Greg in 2003. This activist and music teacher studied classical music at the Conservatoire before joining the group Lion Stepper (formerly I&I). When he started composing, he could imagine nothing other than blending music and politics. “The idea was to react to news items that seemed pretty crazy to me, for example when Balkany tells an American journalist that there are no poor people in France, or to struggles I took part in, for the right to housing, against the CPE in 2006… At the start, I wasn’t thinking of making an album. I react, I do the thing for myself.”
Revolt and freedom
A political commitment that meant Dubamix was first heard at demonstrations and on Radio Libertaire (on Davou’s show “Le Parisien Libertaire”, himself a fan of sonic and political collages). The first album was Mix A Dub, then “Pour qui Sonne le Dub” in 2014. In the meantime, the team has grown, fleshed out by Lion Stepper members Bonj (sound engineer) and Buss (videos), and finally by the arrival of Niko (lighting engineer). More ambitious and more structured, the concept of “Pour Qui Sonne le Dub” is to “draw a parallel between the 1930s and today: the rise of fascism, the economic crisis…” The title explicitly refers to the work of Ernest Hemingway and to the Spanish Civil War. “It was also about reversing the formula into something optimistic. ‘For whom the bell tolls’ is the end of the revolution. For us, ‘Pour qui sonne le dub’ is for the capitalists, the bosses and the cops. What you hear in dub is the revolt and the freedom behind it.”
Behind the sleeve, which pits a factory against a seat of power, we dive into a sound montage that happily blends Jamaican riddims, classical works (Prokofiev, Bach, Haydn, Saint-Saëns, Tchaikovsky…), Gypsy music, popular song… Anything is fair game, and the attentive listener will recognise Leonard Cohen, Sharon Jones, Barbara and Serge Reggiani alike. “Every sample is thought through. I strive to make it coherent from an aesthetic point of view but also a political one. It has to make sense.” That is how Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet ironically dresses up the charge of Class War Dub, how a waltz opens the track Valls in dub (“It was too easy, we couldn’t pass it up”), or how he samples Olivier Messiaen’s “Quatuor pour la fin du Temps” for the track Ils Ne Cherchaient Personne, about the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane. Olivier Messiaen composed this quartet while he was a prisoner in a concentration camp during the Second World War. “The first performance was given in a concentration camp. It is a particular dimension that I wanted to bring to the music by taking up the clarinet.”
The track opens with chilling extracts from the report of the trial of 12 January 1953 in Bordeaux, in which Frédéric Pottecher (who brings great court cases back to life on the radio, editor’s note) quotes the presiding judge Nussy-Saint-Saëns. A stroke of luck: “I already had the whole musical backbone of this dark track to speak about Nazi barbarity. I had the idea of talking about Oradour-sur-Glane, but how do you find samples strong enough to denounce Nazi barbarity? And one day, listening to the radio as the 70th anniversary of Oradour-sur-Glane was being commemorated, this sound clip came up on France Inter.”
Demo slogans, news flashes, interview extracts and politicians’ speeches abound and hit home, notably thanks to the theatricality of certain speeches or media appearances. The best is with speeches, because there is a tone. When you get into samples, you look closely at language and communication strategies. The temptation to dwell on “soundbites” has faded since the first album: “‘Pour Qui Sonne Le Dub’ is more detached from current events than the first album. It is important to have things that are historically dated; it helps perpetuate a memory of struggles. That is also what I do when I put ‘A Las Barricadas’ on ‘Pour Qui sonne le dub’, a Spanish revolutionary song popularised during the civil war in 1936. You have to find the right balance between necessary historical references and universal, timeless values.”
Culture shared by all
To develop the message, singers and rappers are invited. Such as E-one and Skalpel, two members of the crew Première Ligne, Kyam (one of Lion Stepper’s singers), Joke and Yoshi Di Original. Artists “who have something to say”. The radicalism of the message sets Dubamix apart on the dub scene: few dub artists openly describe themselves as far left or libertarian. Even so, Greg qualifies, “many groups work in self-production; in practice, they defend certain values.”
He takes the example of Haydn, who taught Mozart and Beethoven, and who cultivated a certain critical distance from his patrons: one day, poorly paid by his patron, Haydn retorted that he could not pay the whole orchestra. He opted for a grand gesture: at the end of the “Farewell Symphony”, all the players stand up one by one and leave the stage, leaving two violins alone. “It isn’t that work that I sampled, but I like to remind people that there were rebel composers in classical music. I am very attached to culture being shared by all, and not reserved for certain categories.”
All of Dubamix’s tracks are available as free downloads. It stems from his commitment, but it is also a way of returning the favour: “We use a lot of samples of music that already exists. Our music is under a free licence; it can be reused, remixed… It seems normal to me. It is inherent to the project and it will never change.
Revolt and freedom
A political commitment that meant Dubamix was first heard at demonstrations and on Radio Libertaire (on Davou’s show “Le Parisien Libertaire”, himself a fan of sonic and political collages). The first album was Mix A Dub, then “Pour qui Sonne le Dub” in 2014. In the meantime, the team has grown, fleshed out by Lion Stepper members Bonj (sound engineer) and Buss (videos), and finally by the arrival of Niko (lighting engineer). More ambitious and more structured, the concept of “Pour Qui Sonne le Dub” is to “draw a parallel between the 1930s and today: the rise of fascism, the economic crisis…” The title explicitly refers to the work of Ernest Hemingway and to the Spanish Civil War. “It was also about reversing the formula into something optimistic. ‘For whom the bell tolls’ is the end of the revolution. For us, ‘Pour qui sonne le dub’ is for the capitalists, the bosses and the cops. What you hear in dub is the revolt and the freedom behind it.”
Behind the sleeve, which pits a factory against a seat of power, we dive into a sound montage that happily blends Jamaican riddims, classical works (Prokofiev, Bach, Haydn, Saint-Saëns, Tchaikovsky…), Gypsy music, popular song… Anything is fair game, and the attentive listener will recognise Leonard Cohen, Sharon Jones, Barbara and Serge Reggiani alike. “Every sample is thought through. I strive to make it coherent from an aesthetic point of view but also a political one. It has to make sense.” That is how Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet ironically dresses up the charge of Class War Dub, how a waltz opens the track Valls in dub (“It was too easy, we couldn’t pass it up”), or how he samples Olivier Messiaen’s “Quatuor pour la fin du Temps” for the track Ils Ne Cherchaient Personne, about the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane. Olivier Messiaen composed this quartet while he was a prisoner in a concentration camp during the Second World War. “The first performance was given in a concentration camp. It is a particular dimension that I wanted to bring to the music by taking up the clarinet.”
The track opens with chilling extracts from the report of the trial of 12 January 1953 in Bordeaux, in which Frédéric Pottecher (who brings great court cases back to life on the radio, editor’s note) quotes the presiding judge Nussy-Saint-Saëns. A stroke of luck: “I already had the whole musical backbone of this dark track to speak about Nazi barbarity. I had the idea of talking about Oradour-sur-Glane, but how do you find samples strong enough to denounce Nazi barbarity? And one day, listening to the radio as the 70th anniversary of Oradour-sur-Glane was being commemorated, this sound clip came up on France Inter.”
Demo slogans, news flashes, interview extracts and politicians’ speeches abound and hit home, notably thanks to the theatricality of certain speeches or media appearances. The best is with speeches, because there is a tone. When you get into samples, you look closely at language and communication strategies. The temptation to dwell on “soundbites” has faded since the first album: “‘Pour Qui Sonne Le Dub’ is more detached from current events than the first album. It is important to have things that are historically dated; it helps perpetuate a memory of struggles. That is also what I do when I put ‘A Las Barricadas’ on ‘Pour Qui sonne le dub’, a Spanish revolutionary song popularised during the civil war in 1936. You have to find the right balance between necessary historical references and universal, timeless values.”
Culture shared by all
To develop the message, singers and rappers are invited. Such as E-one and Skalpel, two members of the crew Première Ligne, Kyam (one of Lion Stepper’s singers), Joke and Yoshi Di Original. Artists “who have something to say”. The radicalism of the message sets Dubamix apart on the dub scene: few dub artists openly describe themselves as far left or libertarian. Even so, Greg qualifies, “many groups work in self-production; in practice, they defend certain values.”
He takes the example of Haydn, who taught Mozart and Beethoven, and who cultivated a certain critical distance from his patrons: one day, poorly paid by his patron, Haydn retorted that he could not pay the whole orchestra. He opted for a grand gesture: at the end of the “Farewell Symphony”, all the players stand up one by one and leave the stage, leaving two violins alone. “It isn’t that work that I sampled, but I like to remind people that there were rebel composers in classical music. I am very attached to culture being shared by all, and not reserved for certain categories.”
All of Dubamix’s tracks are available as free downloads. It stems from his commitment, but it is also a way of returning the favour: “We use a lot of samples of music that already exists. Our music is under a free licence; it can be reused, remixed… It seems normal to me. It is inherent to the project and it will never change.
Report written by Sébastien Jobart