There's a telling line to be found on the back cover of African Head Charge's debut album, My Life in a Hole in the Ground: "Another 1991 On-U Sound Creation." That's all well and fine, except the album was made in 1981. It's a playful admission that what African Head Charge was doing to dub, post-punk, Afrobeat, industrial, and world music might make more sense 10 years down the road.
It's now 35 years later and Adrian Sherwood's deconstruction of the music of Africa, Jamaica, and Great Britain might have finally found its proper decade and century. With pop stars like M.I.A. grabbing at Brazilian baile funk; dubstep practitioners like Mala and Pinch favoring tracks that sound like pulled taffy; and the spare electronic contortions of Arca, Oneohtrix Point Never, and the Fade to Mind crew, Sherwood’s tracks are more relevant than ever. Last year, his On-U Sound imprint revived itself and began reissuing a wealth of material, from a survey of Sherwood's decades of dub-punk productions to the dizzying Trevor Jackson-curated Science Fiction Dancehall Classics comp. The music could have dated from 2015, no problem.
Now comes the reissuing of the first four albums of his most heady and vital project, AHC. Taking issue with (or maybe just the piss out of) Eno-Byrne's fake ethnography My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, Sherwood created a studio entity along the lines of Eno’s oft-used quote for a "vision of a psychedelic Africa." In much the same manner that Fela's greatest bands had Tony Allen set as the heart, AHC's pulse comes from African percussionist Bonjo Iyabinghi Noah, Sherwood’s co-conspirator throughout AHC. And titling their debut album My Life in a Hole in the Ground was no euphemism, as Berry Street Studios, the space that Sherwood utilized for his early work, was below street level.
Sherwood's work in UK punk and Jamaican expat dub is crucial to understanding post-punk of that era (around this same time, he produced the Fall and many others), and he was at his finest in African Head Charge. The first album is by far the most experimental of the bunch. Take "Elastic Dance," the opening track on My Life in a Hole in the Ground. A jaw harp twangs and flanges, a sinewave wheezes up and down, a skittering and skeletal drum and bass pattern emerge. And then all of it gets bandied about the stereo field by Sherwood. Always stretching his components to the breaking point and finding rubbery new spaces between these elements, Sherwood used dub techniques to explore the outer regions of punk, reggae, Indian classical, belly dancer motifs, and more.
And once you're this far beyond a certain genre's gravitational pull, Sherwood realized that these disparate forms could be melted back together into fucked-up shapes. Years later, "Far Away Chant," featuring the vocals of thunder-throated Prince Far I, even appeared during a violent moment in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart. The emphasis on negative space is such that when Ground standout track "Stebeni’s Theme" recently came on my ear buds during rush hour, the introduction of two percussionists on the train blended into that rubbery beat no problem.
Environmental Studies appeared the next year and was also recorded underground, yielding a similarly claustrophobic, dank feel. More so than the first album, Studies scans as the nexus between free improvisation and dub reggae, less interested in melodic fragments and more about exploring the dark space between the two musical forms. The rotating assemblage of players included Jamaican session players like saxophonist "Deadly" Headley Bennett and drummer Style Scott, who was part of the riddim team that backed everyone from Gregory Isaacs to Black Uhuru, but it also made room for members of the Pop Group and Rip Rig + Panic, as well as UK free improviser Steve Beresford. "Beriberi" showcases a swinging horn line that’s as close to ska as the virtual group ever got while "Crocodile Hand Luggage" pits Bonjo’s nyabinghi drums against the sounds of running water and animal cries.
By the time of Drastic Season, their third album in as many years, Sherwood, Bonjo, and cohorts had moved above ground, setting up at Southern Studios and exploring the digital hardware the studio provided. By then, Sherwood had moved beyond the dub template and began to mince the sounds into ever-smaller pieces. The croak of an actual fish becomes the central element of "I Want Water," as Sherwood drowns it in all sorts of severe, whiplashing effects. Even the smallest of musical gestures, such as the short bass figures and drum taps of "African Hedge Hog," get amplified until they become labyrinths. At times, the tracks scan more as experiments.
Off the Beaten Track struck the perfect balance between the mad professorial experiments of Sherwood and the crack live band that had Bonjo at the helm, but it also marked the end of the group for the next five years. The dub explorations hewed closer to the rhythms now, a sound that would soon be called "ethno-beat" and "tribal." Didgeridoos and gypsy violins get turned into gnarly buzzes, African chants turn into incants, Prince Far I’s chopped declamation mixes into Bonjo’s big beat drums, and the barking dog of "Some Bizarre" is the most psychedelic canine until that ‘shroom-chewing coyote.
Without as many heavy FX at Sherwood’s mixing desk (but an uptick of Fairlight and Synclavier noises), the grooves come to the surface. Here’s the clearest correlation from here to the early-'90s post-rock of Tortoise and HiM, the spacy throbs perpetuated by the Orb, and the illbient wooziness of WordSound’s roster. "Language becomes an instrument of reasoning in the true sense of the word," goes the chorus of "Language & Mentality," voiced by none other than Albert Einstein. While dealing with sounds over words, Sherwood’s work across these early African Head Charge albums nevertheless increased the vernacular of adventurous producers in the decades ahead, sounding all the more resonant in the 21st century.
