“The Legacy Of Dub” is the second album by the Northampton duo Earthquake, released in 1993. It follows up the album “Dub Harder Than Steel”, which captured the interest of the UK dub music community and became an instant classic of the revived dub scene. This scene was kept alive during the late 1980s by the legendary Jah Shaka through his work with his sound system and with dub album releases like the “Commandments Of Dub” series. The Jah Shaka legacy started to flourish in the early ’90s with sound systems and music producers like Aba Shanti I, Iration Steppas, The Disciples, and Manasseh, to name a few. All of them used the new electronic dub sound in their productions, and Earthquake Studio proceeded along that path.
“The Legacy Of Dub” is an example of how militant dub productions reflect the spiritual message of Reggae. Earthquake Studio has a raw energy for shaking foundations; the spiritual message is spread through the frequencies of the music, and even if the music produced in this album sounds different from the golden era of Roots Reggae, it is considered the natural UK evolution of the genre. It is not the Jamaican ghettos, but the English suburbs, that shaped this new sound.
The setup of the studio was the same as for “Dub Harder Than Steel”: a Siel DK-80 synth, a Yamaha home keyboard, a Casio RZ-1 drum machine, and an Atari 1040 computer running Cubase V2.0. The tracks were shaped through an old Dynamix 8-channel mixer and captured on a Casio portable DAT machine. TNT Roots provided the drum, bass, and chord patterns, while Winston Dread added the lead lines and performed the mixing duties.
The album is composed of 10 original dubwise tracks; with their unique style, unusual melodies, and militant drum and bass, they represent the newborn sound for a new generation of UK sound systems. Originally pressed in a very limited run, the album has become a holy grail for sound system music collectors, marking a fundamental chapter in the UK electronic dub scene and paving the way for Earthquake’s later Revelation In Dub series, whose first chapter is re-released in this new batch of Real Rock Records releases.
