Dummy [VINYL]

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Bristol’s junglists were carving new routes to the future in every chopped-up breakbeat, while Portishead were drizzling on muted trumpet solos like so much curdled milk. What we are trying to do is create this air, this atmosphere: It’s the stuff that’s in between the hi-hat and the snare that you can’t hear, but if it wasn’t there you would notice it, it would be wrong. Barrow’s lickety-split vinyl scratching helps counterbalance the uniformly sluggish tempos, but the real action is in their breakbeats. Dummy’s closest antecedent was Massive Attack’s Blue Lines, and not by coincidence: Barrow had worked as an errand boy and tape op in Bristol’s Coach House Studios while that record was being made. In “Wandering Star,” her tone sounds almost flirtatious, despite the overwhelming vastness of her subject matter: “Wandering stars/For whom it is reserved/The blackness, the darkness, forever.

The “Sour Times” beat resembles James Brown’s iconic “ Funky Drummer” break, but transposed for a planet with only half of Earth’s gravity.Gibbons’ voice is the center of the music; she elevates the recordings from tracks to songs, from mere head-nodders to forlorn lullabies. Today, Portishead are regarded with a certain inevitability—their sound so perfectly executed, so in tune with the tenor of its times—that belies the sheer weirdness of how it probably sounded when you first heard it.

More recent issues seemed much cheaper with cover and all and I wonder if they are really still being pressed at Pallas, so I went with this. Over the last few months he has disarmed packed rooms of rowdy concert goers, leaving them silent as they hold fast to every syllable sung.Without a public persona to measure Gibbons’ performance against, her presence within the songs was, and remains, that much more formidable. I was worried about this being GZ press, as they can be hit or miss, but they must have at least one super good press, because this one got the love. As much as Portishead’s sound was part of electronic music’s widespread mellowing, the musicians themselves had little truck with the rave scene; their own roots were closer to the dub and breakbeat traditions that had long been cornerstones of multicultural Bristol.

PJ Harvey flits through its margins; so do the Orb’s stoned swirl and Seefeel’s dubby undercurrents.Recorded at Hive Mind Studios in Brooklyn, NY, with the help of producer/arrangers Mike Buckley and Vincent Chiarito (both members of Charles Bradley's Extraordinaires) and crack team of a-list musicians, his upcoming album blends heavy arrangements and introspective lyrics with sophistication, leaving the listener in a blissful wash of wonderment. In the edit page, go to the 'Metadata' tab and add your Juno artist, label or release page for listeners to purchase your release / releases. Dummy' helped synthesize a new sound that became essential to the Bristol scene, coinciding with bands such as Massive Attack to put West Country trip-hop on the map. Some musicians speak of soundtracks to imaginary films; they created an imaginary soundtrack to use as their source material.