Champagne Dub

The Comet Is Coming & Soccer96 drummer/composer, Maxwell Hallett (aka Betamax) assembles his Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry-revering, reimagined space-dub group, Champagne Dub, for an eight-track chemical paroxysm of original Upsetter dread science, forthcoming February 2024 for On The Corner’s 10th anniversary rotation of interstellar sound.

Recorded in the timewarped underbelly of a community centre in Dalston at The Heliocentrics founder Malcolm Catto’s famous Quartermass Sound Lab, and overdubbed on an old 1986 Ensoniq synth during lockdown, ‘Rainbow’ enlists Ruth Goller on bass (Melt Yourself Down, Sarathy Korwar, Alabaster DePlume), Ed Briggs (DIY electronics, laser bagpipes) & masked Peruvian performance artist & vocalist, Mr Noodles, to combine tuned throbs of echo and bass with laser warfare, raw/celestial dub rock and free improvisation. 

As The Comet Is Coming’s hyper-dimensional acid jazz transmissions take pause and Shabaka’s learnings and journey from saxophone to flute lead him towards deeper grounation, roots of, and in decolonised sound, Hallett’s path continues spacewards, intersecting worlds of performance art, 3024 dubwize science and Hallett’s anti-formula of complete and unbridled “positive creativity”. 

From early memories of watching his Dad, musician and writer Clive Bell (veteran of London’s avant-garde and feature on the final two tracks on the album) with dub/reggae champion & English poet/musician, Jah Wobble, Hallett and Champagne Dub never sought to become a dub tribute act but reference a technology steeped in ancient-future meditation. 

Describing Goller’s playing across ‘Rainbow’, Hallett remarks, “you can sing Ruth’s basslines and feel threatened by them at the same time”. Propelling and washing Hallett’s drums in disastrous, punky chaos, Goller’s bass holds tracks like ‘Wet Drip’ & ‘Refreshment Guy’ together as parts derail, dismount and explode around her. Sitting between Goller and Hallett’s apocalyptic snares on ‘Sand Sink’, sound artist and inventor, Ed Briggs’ performs his very own Laser Bagpipe (possibly the only one of its kind in the world), an inflated rubber glove with tubes receiving light frequencies bouncing off a bit of tin foil and being converted into Jah Shaka-style laser FX. The Hallett-proclaimed “medieval science experimentalist” who once controlled a synth with a petri dish at an early Champagne Dub gig, (and whose other creations include a solar flare detector and an antigravity camera), is given a free role across ‘Rainbow’, unpredictably sparking surges of sound granulation from his bag of homemade DIY electronics.

Once described by an audience member as “my recurring nightmare”, the masked, fictional Mr Noodles cuts an uncomfortable figure in the recording studio and on stage - think Gazelle Twin’s folk-horror jester in Adidas red tassels from the album ‘Pastoral’.

As likely to attack you with a mic stand or pelt you with shitake mushrooms (both true stories from early shows), Mr Noodles’ presence is awkward and dangerous as cryptic passages are spat from the subconscious off-mic, lying scattered in the album’s rubble. Noodles reflects: "when the fog is there you stare /  and the crowd said... despair, don’t stare…" in both whispered and maximal tones on ‘Cumulosnimbus’. Two of the most expansive tracks in the set, the album’s title track and ‘Chanco Vaca’, call in Hallett’s Dad, Clive Bell on Melodica, Toy Panpipes and Shakuhachi (a Japanese bamboo flute that Bell studied in 1970s whilst travelling south east Asia before returning to London’s free-improv gutter to introduce a young Max). On the desk, Sons Of Kemet, Shabaka & King Krule producer, Dilip ‘Demus’ Harris amplifies and supersizes the portal through which Mr Noodles, Ed, Ruth and Betamax yield psyche-chaos on ‘Rainbow’ and lean deeper into the alchemy.