Dub emerged in Jamaica in the late 1960s and early 1970s, born largely out of accident and experimentation in the mixing booth. Engineers like King Tubby and Lee “Scratch” Perry began stripping down existing reggae recordings, muting vocals, isolating drum and bass, and drenching the remains in tape echo, spring reverb, and radical EQ moves. What started as B-side novelty became its own art form, one where the mixing desk itself functioned as an instrument and the studio became a site of composition. This ethos, that a song could be endlessly reconstructed, hollowed out, and rebuilt in the mix, proved to be dub’s most enduring export.
By the 1990s, that ethos had crossed the Atlantic and mutated in Berlin, where producers like Basic Channel took dub’s spaciousness and echo-laden texture and married it to the four-on-the-floor pulse of techno. Dub techno favored minimalism and hypnotic repetition, letting chords decay into washes of reverb over a steady mechanical rhythm. Around the same time in London, a different mutation was underway: UK garage slowed down and darkened into dubstep, foregrounding sub-bass weight, syncopated half-time drum patterns, and cavernous space between hits.
In the years since, producers have continued to push dub’s core principles into new electronic territory entirely, arriving at something loosely termed Future Dub: productions that treat dub’s spatial and textural vocabulary as a foundation for synthesis, sound design, and genre-blurring experimentation, often abandoning traditional instrumentation altogether in favor of synthesizers, samples, and studio-native sound.
dubTRAK’s Loss of TRAKtion draws from every strand of this history at once. Through its eight tracks, the record moves from bass runs and weird melodic bounce that could pass for a lost King Tubby session, through reverb-soaked workouts steeped in urban grit, into passages of genuinely alien synthesis that owe as much to future-facing sound design as to Kingston tape echo. This is a producer who understands dub not as a fixed genre but as a set of ideas, space, echo, weight, and mutability, and applies those ideas with real range and confidence.
The album opens on familiar ground with “Raw King Steppa,” pairing a classic dub bass run with a melodic bounce that carries an almost harmonium-like character, playful and infectious from the first bar. “Dodging Bullets” follows with patience, building slowly toward a heavier payoff and giving a solid acoustic drum set room to shine during a midtrack break that stands out nicely. “Step With Care” leans hard into reverb as its organizing principle, with slow, thick, heavily treated drums and bass, punctuated by short, classy bursts of accordion during its melodic interludes. There’s a grimy, urban edge to this one, distinctly removed from sun-drenched Kingston imagery. “Don-Key-Step” opens with a slow, thick rhythm and a sparse, killer synth melody, settling into a deeply chilled groove built from genuinely weird synth textures that feel completely at home in the track. It plays like dub beamed in from another dimension, and it’s an album highlight.
A short ambient lead-in opens “Watching the World through the Fish Tank” before hand drums, bongos and congas among them, pull it firmly out of ambient territory. Thick hand percussion and a deep, solid bassline take control, accented by strange synth flourishes and period-specific samples that lend the whole thing a late-1950s poolside space-age-tropicalia feel. It’s our favorite track on the record, hands down. “Care-free Sistah” opens with soft synth plinking and a simple melody before a kick-snare combo and modulated hi-hat slowly work their way in; the melody gathers reverb and complexity as a rising crescendo and bass synth join the fray. Near the midpoint the track fades to a brief silence before returning heavier, with more distorted bass, video-game-adjacent synth oddities, and slide guitar samples pushing it deep into reverb territory. A genuinely nice track.
A deep, bright, almost happy bassline drives “Drive-by Transfusion,” with reverb-drenched synth fragments fading in at the edges and rim shots panning side to side before a solid 4/4 kick locks everything into motion. It carries more of a classic sound at its core without ever feeling retro or safe, and it’s a genuine mover, a real strong cut. “High Noon Shootout in Moose Jaw” closes the album with a slow, quiet fade-in of vibrato-heavy, vintage-toned synth and gradually gathering drums, before the whole mix snaps into sharp focus with serious gain behind it. What follows is a heavy, distorted, growling bass performance paired with drums that go through constant transformation, growing snappier and heavier as the track builds to its close. A strong finish to a genuinely strong album.
Eight tracks, and every one of them is fresh — no hint of retread of the one that came before it. dubTRAK moves from roots-faithful bass runs to genuinely alien synth work, from chilled, patient grooves to heavy, distorted excursions, and he holds it all together as a single scorching statement. Loss of TRAKtion plays like the work of someone who has spent real time inside dub’s history and came out the other side with something new to add to it, a record that earns the deep-dive opening this review gave it and then some.
Loss of TRAKtion by Dubtrak released 11th of August 2026 exclusively on Getcha Records