When French provocateur Serge Gainsbourg decamped to Jamaica in 1978 to cut a reggae record, the befuddled rhythm section of drummer Sly Dunbar and bassist Robbie Shakespeare didn’t know quite what to do with the singer. “It was quite tense,” producer Philippe Lerichomme recalled in the Gainsbourg biography A Fistful of Gitanes. At least, it was until the two parties realized that the one French song all Jamaicans knew was Gainsbourg’s softcore classic, “Je T’Aime... Moi Non Plus,” kicking off a strange collaboration that lasted four years. In the decades since, Sly & Robbie have provided the bedrock to any number of distant visitors, from Grace Jones to Carly Simon, Joe Cocker to Bob Dylan. They first teamed up with Vladislav Delay (aka Finnish producer Sasu Ripatti) in Norway for 2018’s warped dub fusion album Nordub, alongside trumpeter Nils Petter Molvær and guitarist Eivind Aarset, and subsequently toured together. Whether or not they were familiar with Ripatti’s dubby body of work, they made fast friends.
In January 2019, Ripatti decamped to Kingston to again work with the bass and drum legends, stripping things back to essentials to create 500-Push-Up. Working with little more than Sly & Robbie’s in-studio jamming, some overheard chatter, and atmospheric field recordings, Ripatti then took things back to his home studio on the tiny Finnish island of Hailuoto to refine further. On paper, it sounds tantalizing: dub techno’s smoggiest practitioner teaming up with as foundational a rhythm section as Jamaica (indeed, the world) has ever produced. But it never quite emulsifies.
Neither side rests on their laurels, but they frustratingly stagnate somewhere in between their two signature styles, the rhythms not wholly entrancing, the haze not absolute. 500-Push-Up follows a basic—redundant, even—pattern: Let Sly & Robbie lay down an unchanging pulse while Ripatti conjures noisy frequencies around it. At a certain density, draw it all back down. Robbie’s bass gets noisy and gnarled on “(522),” but it’s irritating rather than visceral, like Delay’s bracing return Rakka was earlier this year. No matter the amount of clanging metal and electronic effects Ripatti triggers on “(521),” Sly’s drums stay locked down like a concrete foundation in a hurricane. Which should be a thrilling sound, only Ripatti does little to shape the track into coherence. The digital detritus Ripatti dumps atop “(514)” sounds like an entire video game arcade glitching, the noise growing denser as Sly & Robbie rumble somewhere underneath it.
Ripatti draws on the austerity of classic dub productions by King Tubby and Keith Hudson, but he still manages to clutter up the dub, yielding undistinguished din. It takes nearly two minutes for “(513)” to get going, as studio chatter runs on and on (though there are some choice bits like “Sasu, you gonna get riddim confuse, bloodclot!”). A gluey white noise thickens around the elements to the point of opacity, sirens arising and metal gnashing somewhere in the smog, with Robbie’s migraine throb carrying on through it all.
At the most intriguing moments, they strike a balance. On “(520),” Sly & Robbie yet again lock into some distorted, snake-charming low end while Ripatti conjures a UFO’s whirring, the whole thing churning and thickening into a haze. It makes you wish for the immersive depths that made Entain, Multila, and Anima such brain-erasing explorations. Messy but not mysterious, lackadaisical rather than spacey, 500-Push-Up never quite plays to its parties’ obvious strengths.
Buy: Rough Trade
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