DUB TRANSMISSIONS :: Dub Spencer & Trance Hill

A living, breathing and kicking monster of groove, Dub Spencer & Trance Hill offers an irresistible blend of heavy, spacey dub movements and psychedelic rock, spiced with just the right dose of slinky electronics. They have been tearing up clubs in Europe since 2006, and after releasing 5 studio albums are now celebrating their first live output: Live In Dub & The Victor Rice Remixes. These guys are doing things organically, playing real, live, energetic, colorful and fresh music. I caught up with Julian Dillier—the talented drummer of Dub Spencer & Trance Hill—to bring you this exclusive interview and introduce you to a sonic treasure.

Igloo :: Hey there Julian. Please introduce the band to our readers, tell us where you are from, and how and when it all started.

Julian :: Dub Spencer & Trance Hill: Philipp Greter, organ, keys & fx; Julian Dillier, drums; Markus Meier, guitar & voc; Masi Stalder, bass & voc. Sound engineering / mixing desk & fx by Umberto Echo. DS & TH is a Swiss live Dub Band. With our instruments we try to play what started in the late 60s in Jamaica, when sound engineers and producers created a new kind of club dance music by remixing reggae songs. What came out were instrumental groove tracks with a lot of echo, reverb and delays as style elements. So what we do is, adapt this spirit into a live mode. The band started in 2004 as a trio that released a first album in 2006 with bass, drums, saxophone and lots of effects. In 2007 we turned into a quartet.

You play original material but also do covers for songs by bands such as The Clash, Deep Purple, Metallica, and occasionally you also do covers for some classic pop songs and more. Tell us a bit about your musical influences.

These are two different aspects. The covers we play are not necessarily the music that influenced us! We found it funny to choose strange songs to cover and make dub versions of. Pop classics from the 80s, metal and punk songs, even film music and songs that actually shouldn’t be covered anymore, like “Smoke on the Water.” Some of these songs we “deformed” so much that you can hardly recognize them. For example we took this high energy clash song “Should I Stay or Should I Go” and slowed it down so much that it turned into a very chilly deep dub tune with a completely different mood. This work was documented on our album Riding Strange Horses. When it comes to influences we have to mention completely different bands. Dub Trio from New York City for example is a band that we all love and definitely influenced us in the sense of how a band can play dub music live, music that in its origin is not played by a live band. Especially the first album of Dub Trio is a blast. The DS & TH sound is unique in its own way, but sure you can say its influenced by the music of bands like Pink Floyd, Massive Attack, The Police, Tratosphere, or artists like King Tubby, Bob Marley, even Jimi Hendrix.

Let’s talk a little bit about your relationship with reggae / dub producer Umberto Echo. Your latest studio album, ‘Too Big To Fail’ (Echo Beach, 2012) is a collaborative work with him and one of your finest releases in my opinion. Tell us about the making of ‘Too Big To Fail’ and the creative process in the studio with Umberto.

Umberto and Dub Spencer is a love relationship—we met that guy in Munich and he offered to mix our concert at a festival in Munich. Of course we realized immediately that he isn’t only a first class sound engineer but also an artist who really thinks very musically. His aesthetics of when, how and which effects to put on our instruments (what he loves doing from his mixing desk during the concerts) fit very well with our vision of dub music. Since then he is our “official” sound engineer on tour. After 3 years of touring together we wanted to document this work on a studio album. The approach was to play as live as possible. We wrote new tunes, Umberto Echo recorded them but also did the dub effects live. So it’s a little bit like a live album, but recorded in the studio, a little bit like jazz musicians work.

Your new live album, ‘Live In Dub & The Victor Rice Remixes’ was released on March this year. What material does it contain?

After touring around Europe during 6 years with 5 studio albums in the backpack it is a logical step for a band to have the idea of doing a live album, to capture that special energy of a live concert. We felt that musically and technically we were ready for this. Umberto Echo recorded about 10 live gigs on the 2012 tour and it was easy to find enough good material to put on that album which is out now on Echo Beach. When we played at the Fusion Festival in Germany 3 years ago, there was this guy named Victor Rice (a U.S. dub producer and DJ) who was doing a DJ set at one of the freaky dance areas at this wonderful, colorful festival. But this guy was special. He had only a few tracks on his 8-track tape recorder that he played. He put the 8 tracks separately on the a mixing desk an mixed live dub versions of those tunes (see video). Everybody could watch him doing this and were immediately sucked in by the warmth of his sound and the smoothness of this flowing music that came out of the speakers. The funny thing: when the tape was finished he made a break, rewind it and started all over with the same tunes, mixing them in a new way. It never got boring and he could do this for hours. When Echo Beach had the idea of combining our live tracks with Victor Rice remixes (he remixed DS & TH tracks from our past studio albums) we were in! The Rice remixes turned out to be very cool so we decided to bring them out also separately on vinyl (also released on Echo Beach, March 22, 2013).

Tell us a bit about your live shows, it seems that it’s something you really enjoy doing. In which countries have you visited so far, and when and where was your first gig?

Our first gig as a quartet was in fall 2006 in Kiel, Germany. An exciting moment. At this time we were experimenting a lot with set ups, sounds, instruments, effects, to find a band sound. it was an interesting period and we had no idea in which direction it would take us. But soon we found out what were the skills and strengths of each member and we tried to feature them. What came out was an open minded, playful live band who played instrumental psychedelic dub trance roots reggae with a touch of rock’n’roll. At first we didn’t know if anybody besides us will like what we were doing, but then when the label Echo Beach and the booking agency Soulfire Artist supported us, we were able to spread our music and found a lot of very different people who liked it. So we were able to build a fan-base that is still growing and interested in DS & TH. So far we played mostly in Germany and Switzerland, but we also had gigs in France, Italy, Austria, Czech Republic, Slovenia and Croatia.

When and where can we catch your live shows this year?

See “concerts” at our website. There are festivals shows to come in summer 2013.

You have a cool band name, tell us how you came up with it. Do you have thing for Spaghetti Western?

Of course, the movies of Bud Spencer & Terence Hill have been a part of our childhood. They are very famous in Switzerland. Masi, our bass player actually had a little part as a kid in the Bud Spencer movie Banana Joe, so the name is connected with real positive memories, especially for him.

Tell us about an album or a band / artist you’ve been really into lately.

Ohh, there are many. But there is one gig by a French duo called Bumcello that we all have very good memories from. When we played at the Telerama Dub Festival in Paris, these two musicians were performing after us and I have to tell you, this was one of the best concerts I have seen in years. We all felt that the live performance of Bumcello is incredible. Two people made the whole club go dancing! Very inspiring.

What’s next for Dub Spencer & Trance Hill?

We are in the middle of our tour, so we don’t think further because this is what we work for during the rest of the year (preparation, organization, promotion etc.) Touring is what we like the most. We try to enjoy every aspect of it and who knows what or who inspires us next…maybe our kids…?

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All of Dub Spencer & Trance Hill’s albums are available from the band directly via their Website, and also from all Amazon stores. [Release page on Echo Beach].

Photos by Severin Ettlin and Manuel Knobel.