Quasi Dub Development :: Little-Twister vs Stiff-Neck (Pingipung)

Little-Twister vs Stiff-Neck is skinny dub adorned with beads and body paint that throws elbows at genre expectations.

Luca Fadda and F.S. Blumm established the pan-Atlantic Quasi Dub Development collective with the highly-regarded Limousine to the Guillotine, featuring Alessandro Coronas on drums. Now the trio has expanded—it shrinks and expands according to the demands of track, album or show—and has stripped its rhythms closer down to the bone while maintaining its characteristic electronic squiggles and rich horns.

Trumpeter (and effects man) Fadda resides in New York City and guitarist (and bricoleur) Blumm in Berlin. Both are also imaginative and versitile players (Blumm assumes bass duties on this album, Fadda blows the flugelhorn) who create and arrange the structure of their dub live (though with an ocean separating them) rather than via the genre’s traditional studio post-production echo and drop. Three drummers take turns here, including label-mate Sven Kacirek, while New Yorker Jason Candler is a one-man woodwind section.

Little-Twister vs Stiff-Neck is skinny dub, adorned with beads and body paint. It’s sweet and smart and throws elbows at genre expectations. Perfectly sized at twelve single-length tracks, the album is more cohesive and dare I say accessible than its predecessor, terrific though it was. I expect that, as the name informs, we should never expect two Quasi Dub Development albums to ever be alike.

Three tracks feature veteran Lady Ann toast-singing in her still-girlish though slightly churlish voice and the immortal Lee Scratch Perry, who begins by sharing an intimate domestic phone call and then free associates into typically delightful incoherence via various biff-boff-boofs, eventually twists the name “Picasso” into “I am Christ,” performs the ironically titled “Let’s Communicate.”

As cartoony as the band presents itself, deeply bred into its dub is a sly old jazz sensibility, particularly on “Vau Wau Bau” and “Tschaka Tschaka.” And oh the sweet, drifting melodica on “Snake Squeezer.” Victor Rice—American dub and ska all-star—closes proceedings by brilliantly duberizing “Zebroid Z,” the original version of which is the album’s ear-to-ear, smiling, welcoming opening track.

Little-Twister vs Stiff-Neck is available on Pingipung.