Edward George vividly remembers when he was first abducted – his word – by music. It was 1973 and he was 10 – the comics-loving son of Dominican immigrants flogging copies of West Indian World newspaper at Ridley Road market in Dalston, London. “It being the East End there was a lot of shouting. Turks, Asians, Caribbean folk. Noise. Jewish shops selling reggae. Because I was little, my sense of space and smell was always heightened. Suddenly there was this other sound. It was as if someone had just pulled a three-dimensional space apart, stuck my head inside it, and gone. ‘Look! A whole other world! Frightening, isn’t it?’ That was dub. That was the future.”
Dub, associated with singular producers such as King Tubby and Lee “Scratch” Perry, is a form of reggae in which tracks have their vocals stripped or distorted. Drum and bass are emphasised. Heavy use is made of echo and reverb. The results are often eerie, vertiginous, freighted with a sense of displacement and loss. The same could be said about the work George made as part of the Black Audio Film Collective, a group of seven young black Britons who bonded at Portsmouth polytechnic in the early 1980s and, until they disbanded in 1998, made a series of experimental, potently melancholic films (among them Handsworth Songs and Twilight City) that pondered the legacies of imperialism.
