Review magazine. By Robert Martin.
Listening Party Happening Saturday, January 4th at Audiogazing.
For four decades now musician David Asher has invested his considerable talents as an instrumentalist, vocalist, and visionary songwriter into cultivating a respected reputation as an iconoclastic creative force in the world of Reggae, Electronic, and Dub music.
Based out of Vassar, Michigan, from his early groundbreaking work weaving together Rock & Reggae music with his band The Process, evolving into his later focus as an On-U-Sound DJ and with his current group The D.A.B. Band, Asher has continuously created great music without ever compromising his integrity in order to attain mass popularity. Instead, he followed his own muse and never looked back.
Possessing an encyclopedic memory and knowledge of both Reggae music and Jamaican folk culture, mythology, and religion, in essence Asher’s music is an amalgamation of modern Dystopian spirituals, songs of revolution, and a clarion call to liberate the mind, body, and spirit from the shackles of oppression and injustice - much of it inspired by the purity of his musical heroes Bob Marley and Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, whose music was also fired by spiritual power and political purpose as much as it was for inspirational entertainment.
Asher’s current transformation with his latest project Dabtronic consists of a unique brand of concoction, creation, and mystical interpretations rendered through the ears of different mixes by world-class producers designed to explore ways that reggae, ska, dub, rocksteady, dancehall, and reggae/soul fusion music can all flow together and give different textures, sensations, and reactions to the same basic song or track.
His newest release with Dabtronic titled I Blinked is an original composition written and performed by Asher along with British vocalist Janique James and Mark Stewart, an English singer who recently passed away and was also a founding member of The Pop Group, a pioneering post-punk band notable for sonic experimentation, political conviction, and a willingness to collaborate.
With densely throbbing yet addictive instrumentation and coloration, the song itself is replete with lyrics forging a foreboding clarity that sparkles like glass shattering on a Dystopian highway: I Blinked / The mornings they are always too early / I was invoiced for the air I had breathed / Happiness is charged by the meter. And my favorite line by Stewart: ‘Memories are fuel to burn for a brighter future of impossible possibilities.
Taking the framework of this single song as the foundation, seven different track mixes are included on the album, three mixed by Asher and Chris Lewis at Fire Hyena Studio, two by legendary On U Sound producer Adrian Sherwood in Ramsgate UK, one mixed by Pats Doktor from the Netherlands, and two mixed by Alien Levi out of Germany, with a dark mumbling vocal overdub woven into the track by Rex Joswig.
Asher says Dabtronic began as a conceptual idea he developed to work with different artists from around the world within the Electronic/Dub context where he would play all the instruments and bring in different vocalists or instrumentalists to do different tracks of each song presented to them.
“Dub is a musical style that grew out of reggae in the late 1960s and early 1970s that consists of remixes of recordings created by significantly manipulating the original, usually through the removal of vocal parts or emphasis of the rhythm section, along with the application of different studio effects” he explains.
“By the time the 90s rolled around, it was common for bands like Depeche Mode to record a song and release two or three different mixes of it,” he continues. “I enjoy the different takes various producers will do on a track. With some there are subtle differences, whereas others go pretty deep. Jamaican dub music is the stuff I grew up on, and I loved the process of working with these different artists, which was a great blessing.”
“This release is also one of Mark Stewart’s last recordings. He was really big artist in the UK during the second wave of Punk, right around the time groups like The Clash and The Slits came out, only was from Bristol instead of London and not as well known internationally, despite the fact they had three or four albums that did really well in the UK.”
“Janique James is also a really interesting performer,” continues Dave. “She’s out of Birmingham and wrote some unique lyrics about being trapped by geography and imprisoned by peoples’ ideas about what you should be in this world. Not everybody did the same thing with every mix and it’s a lot like gears shifting while other doors are closing and very atmospheric.”
“Mark and Janique wrote the lyrics and handled the vocals, and I wrote the music for the most part,” continues Asher. “Mark Stewart was a well-known performer who didn’t’ necessarily possess a pretty voice so much as a necessary one that was politically aware and visionary and similar to Trent Reznor in the sense he would use the approach William Burrough’s did of adopting cut-up word techniques to assemble new lyrical structures.”
The release launch for I Blinked will be happening on Saturday, January 4th at Audiogazing in Saginaw for a Listening Party that will go from 1:00 - 2:00 PM to celebrate the vinyl and CD release of Dabtronic’s latest outing, and Asher will be signing copies of the release during the event. Copies will also be available exclusively on Bandcamp at the moment, while all of Asher’s work with Dabtronic, The D.A.B. Band and his catalog with The Process are also available on Bandcamp and Spotify.
Asher says initial reaction to this latest release by Dabtronic has been strong, with half of the firstl vinyl and CD pressings having already been purchased during pre-sales, and orders coming in from places like Japan, Finland, the Netherlands, and Scotland, to name but a few.
Additionally, he is gearing up The D.A.B. Band with two new single releases titled Jah Shield and War Profiteers along with two new members, guitarist Reichlin Small and 5-string bassist Boe Glasschild, who joined the group after the passing of former bassist Louis Gladney six months ago. Their next scheduled appearance is Friday, April 4th at the Hash Bash Cup at Wyndham Garden in Ann Arbor.
Asher also continues to host his On-U-Sound Sunday Roast Podcast, which can be heard on the last Sunday of every month at 3:00 PM EST on Wigeon Airwaves, where he has broadcast 95 shows since 2016 and clocked thousands of listeners. On December 29th producer Adrian Sherwood will be hosting the show and bringing exclusive mixes to air.
