DUB TREES Schallplatten & CDs

Review: Originally released in 2016, Celtic Vedic now lands on vinyl for the first time, fully remastered and expanded with a previously unreleased track. At the heart of this sprawling ambient dub record is Youth - aka Martin Glover - whose decades-deep credentials (Killing Joke, The Orb, Pink Floyd, Paul McCartney, etc) need little introduction. One of his most revered and emulated projects, Dub Trees pitted Jah Wobble, Matt Black (Coldcut), Andrew Weatherall, Mixmaster Morris against a host of instrumentalists from the Celtic and Indian classical traditions. Flutes, harps, tubaphone, pipes and chants are warped and refracted through Youth's psydub prism, tracing speculative links between Druidic and Vedic cultures. This LP closes a trilogy that began with Hicksville and East Of The River Ganges, and still sounds great: holographic, saturated, and utterly unplaceable.

Review: UK dub punk innovator, ambient dub pioneer and sometime super producer Youth revisits one of his most expansive projects with a remastered vinyl edition of this offering, originally released under the Dub Trees banner in 2016. It's a vast, cinematic journey-eleven dubbed-out voyages plus a bonus track-where psydub, spiritual jazz, and ancient modal drones converge in exploratory motion. The 'Distant Green Shore Dub' of 'Return To The River Ganges' sets the tone: booming sub-bass, glistening tabla, and warped pads swirling like incense smoke. 'Mediolana (Ambrosirus Dub)' and 'Dhaka Corinthia (Gergeovic Dub)' fold Mediterranean and Bengali textures into tripped-out spatial frameworks, while 'Voyage of the Pytheas (Pagan Dub)' and 'Delfic Tongue (Hercynian Forest Dub)' veer into Weatherall-esque terrain-part kosmische, part misty-eyed ritual. Galician pipes, bansuri, tubaphone and Celtic harp all shimmer through the mix, filtered through Youth's dense, tactile production. This is folk memory via aux cable-pagan futurism that's both grounded and astral.