Ilpo Väisänen deviates from the Dub manifesto as written by Lee Perry and the gang to give us the bare bones of an already lean beast. Bleached out beats skitter around amid rarefied textures and percussive patterns fluctuate lending it all the air of a broken ideology.
Is it a repost to post-socialist despair in the Western world? Or just Ilpo experimenting with space? Maybe both. The bass that anchors trad Dub is absent, aside from sub-sub-woofer type punctuations, as are trademark drops, although much of it feels like one big drop down the elevator shaft into a bottomless black hole. Many have played fast and loose with Dub in mind across all electronic genres but Väisänen's Commie variation is grittier than most. Avoiding cookie cutter traps, these tracks are an idea of Dub that got lost somewhere along the way. That's no bad thing.
Father Sun Rudealis is more in the spirit of Black Ark science than the mode, if The Upsetter can be said to have had only one. Kolyma Stoned virtually disappears around the 3min mark, remaining as a ghost rhythm whilst jagged minimalist effects take over. Whilst there are echoes of his part in Pan Sonic, it lacks their disciplined approach. Ironically, it's the opposite of regimental Red theory in history; striking strange, awkward, unruly blows for freedom from regulation. Whether that's to its advantage I'll leave you to decide.
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