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 New
Darleks
By NEIL YOUNG, Tearaway Magazine, November 2002
Peter McLennan (left): getting dub with
it. Nice shirt!
Dub Asylum’s jandle-licious debut album She Dubs
Me, She Dubs Me Not follows on from the greasy good times
of the Dub Never Sleeps EP.
Listening to She Dubs Me is like joyfully fossicking
around in a kitsch-cluttered seaside op’ shop.
Let’s take a rummage!
Welcome, Haere Mai sets the feel with its good-humoured
tin can beat and the tweedy BBC tones of an announcer hoisted
out of the archives: “Greetings to all record enthusiasts!”
Freddy Is A Bad-Ass Dub Fiend hazily shimmers like
a heat-mirage in the distance on a hot tarseal road.
Revenge Of The Rogue Field Transmitters is Dr
Who in an Hawaiian shirt, fusing log drums and wavery
surf guitar with Darlek thrums ‘n’ bleeps.
The man behind it all is Peter McLennan, formerly a member
of the indefinable Hallelujah Picassos – in his words, “reggae-thrash-punk-ska-mutants”
– who sprawled subversively over New Zealand’s musical landscape
in the nineties.
Scuffing it up
“After playing in Hallelujah Picassos for eight years,” he
says, “I collected a fair bit of musical paraphernalia, including
a four-track cassette recorder.”
This, along with a fairly new second-hand home computer, is
still the basis of his home studio.
“The funny thing is,” he muses, “since I’ve got my computer
I’ve got more bits of technology in there, various software
plug-ins and musical bits and pieces which can actually make
my drums sound even dirtier.
“I like the idea of using technology that’s crisp and digital
to make something absolutely scungey!”
Works in progress
From the home set-up, tracks for She Dubs Me were
shuffled to the “flasher” recording facilities of the likes
of Bfm, where they came together over a year or so in their
own good time.
“The album sorta evolved between living and working and all
the other bits and pieces that take up daily life.
“I ended up writing a lot more tracks than I used, because
I was trying to find tracks that were strong on their own
and strong as a collection.”
A key part of the process involved wandering about listening
to early cuts on his walkman.
“I’d just stick them on and listen when I was walking, just
see what other sounds I’d hear in my head: ‘Oh, okay, that
needs a vocal’ or ‘That needs some saxophone or maybe some
piano…’
“And I’d go, ‘Okay, who do I know that can do that?’”
She Dubs Me subseqently features collobarations with
a whole rabble of cool cats, including Nick Atkinson (Supergroove,
The Roughness), Sandy Mill (SJD, Spacesuit) and Tom Ludvigson
(Trip To The Moon, Alloy).
“I was reallly lucky to get all these amazing people to work
on She Dubs Me.
“For [final track] Close Down, Sandy Mill came over
to my place for the session and she had this really beaten
up old delay pedal and she said, ‘Oh, I thought we might use
this for the track.
“So we sorta plugged her microhone into that. I think she
did it in about one take, and just basically sang live and
fiddled with the delay pedal at the same time.
“I still can’t tell what she’s singing about, but it sounds
really cool, quite spacey and grungey.”
If I dubbed you once…
“The thing I sorta like about dub,” says Pete, ”is it’s a
music with a history, but it’s history is essentially based
on constantly re-writing itself.
“It’s like hiphop in a sense, it’s about knowing your roots
but also doing everything you can to re-invent the wheel and
come up with something new.”
“There’s a lot of really great dub stuff coming out of Wellington
right now. In terms of New Zealand music, personally I find
it to be the most interesting stuff out there….“
Don’t worry…
Pete says: “I want my album to make people happy. That’s probably
a deeply uncool thing in the ‘ironic’ age we live in, but
I like the idea of making people smile, I think it’s a good
thing.”
Right on!
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