Black Market – The Next Dub

We don’t post a lot of remixes or re-interpretations here on the site but, occasionally, you come across something so compelling, so absurd, so surprisingly effective that you just can’t skip over it.

Black Market has a rather extensive catalog of “Dub” remixes that cover a wide range of musical subjects. Here’s their manifesto:

What would happen if The Beach Boys had The Wailers as their backing band instead of The Wrecking Crew? What if David Bowie spent the summer of 1975 in Kingston, Jamaica with King Tubby instead of Philidelphia? Michael Jackson meets Scratch Perry? These questions are the basic thesis of Black Market.

On paper, this should not work. Hearing the Angelo Badalementi soundtrack to Twin Peaks reworked as dub, or X-Files extensively re-layered or Bowie languishing in the genre feels like a complete recipe for disaster that manages to never falter. Yes, the source material is fantastic but there’s an infinite amount of remixes and reworkings in the world that completely botch the originals, resulting in an unlistenable mess. That’s not the case here.

Per their own recommendation, this second EP of David Bowie tracks, The Next Dub, is the best spot to start when diving into their catalog. It doesn’t contain any actual tracks from The Next Day but it does have Bowie covering the Beatles through their dub lens, that’s a double dose of layers!

Regardless of your feelings on the ability to enjoy this on a daily basis, you still gotta give it up for a Grade A execution across the board here.