Dub Ditch Picnic

DDP 1971.022 Wolfskull – ‘Stink Void’ C90
Ed. of 100. This is some heavy, heavy shit. Not heavy in stacks-of-amps, doom sort of way — though you will feel doomed while listening to this best-of collection. New Zealand’s Wolfskull are heavy in the sense that if you heard this oozing out of your cousin’s basement bedroom you’d immediately hold an intervention. Muttered vocals, wandering guitar lines and plenty of bad vibes, Wolfskull are audio equivalent to that small town that you just keep driving through, even though you’re already running fumes. This is what they do. This is what they sound like. This anthology culls together the band’s best tracks, chosen by Wolfskull (and Root Don Lonie for Cash) member Clayton Noone is a harrowing listen that evokes strange forest rituals and small-town inhabitants gone mad from the heat. w/ Download.

DDP 1971.023 Fletcher Pratt – ‘Dub Sessions Vol. 2’ C30
Ed. of 75. Winnipeg’s mad scientist of hallucinatory visuals and hot-wired electronics returns with his second volume in his Dub Sessions series. And what a workout this one is. The aptly titled “Huge Dub” begins with a classic Dre keyboard lead and a stuttering hi-hat straight outta present-day dirty south rap while a spacey dub progression floats in the background. It sounds like Pratt’s replaced his bong water with Purple Drank and stayed up all night re-imagining and re-working dub and southern fried rap. The results are seamless. Volume 2 touches on the all the trademark touchstones of dub, trippy reverb and delay and trance-inducing basslines, and combines them with thick, heavy synths, before chopping-and-screwing the whole mess and throwing in some big booty bass for good measure. Yet Pratt also shows some restraint and almost cinematic sensibilities — the true mark of master. Mellow enough for late-night drift-off sessions and heavy enough for beat addicts, Pratt knows when you’ve had just enough herb and makes you get off that beanbag chair and hit the dance floor. w/ Download

DDP 1971.024 JLK//Babysitter C30
Ed. of 75. This cassette brings together Montreal artist Jane Kasowicz (Velvet Chrome) and Victoria’s Babysitter. Culled from merely a few days of jamming, the sounds within are at once loose and spellbinding. The aptly titled “Buddies” starts things off with an almost delta blues guitar raga while Jane howls like voodoo priestess luring wayward townsfolk to her fireside ritual. The 10+ minute “Wanderings” turns the identifiable structures and chords of the previous tracks on their heads: Droning guitars, stuttering drums, murky electronics and multi-layered, delay-soaked vocals swirl into a thick, swampy audio gumbo. w/ download.

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