Glitchhall

Jamaican music has long been a contributor to the European avant garde and you'd be hard pressed to find a contemporary highbrow genre in the nebulous art-popular field that doesn't reference or relate to (at least) dub in some way. Glitch, for instance, definitely counts dub among its chief influences, as Jamaicans were among the first to create music on a larger scale by consistently misusing technical equipment to create strange noises.

Well, in autumn 2009 this influence seems to have gone full circle. Listen to these two recent tracks by major Jamaican dancehall artists:

Black Ryno - Pon di Earth (produced by Demented)


Busy Signal - Black Belt (produced by Kirkledove and Jukeboxx)


The riddim (Arrhythmia) of the first track has a second "snare drum" totally done in glitch style with some sort of noisy digital cut thing, whereas the "metronome" in the second track seems to be made up of skip-around clicks. Brilliant! I'm not going to claim it's a conscious connection, but some people in Jamaica are obviously fucking around with their machinery... AGAIN.