Blackbeard—Dennis Bovell—doesn’t quite have the same reputation as Augustus Pablo, Lee “Scratch” Perry, Mad Professor or the other great names in dub. His dubs aren’t as spiritual as Pablo’s, as visionary as Perry’s or as mind-bending as anything by Mad Professor, but Strictly Dub Wize and I Wah Dub show a judicious production hand. His tracks are trippy, but not showily so, and never at the expense of a big, moving, bass-heavy bottom end. The albums come from what is arguably dub’s pinnacle in the late 1970s—released in 1978 and 1980 respectively—when technology opened up the sound palate for producers, but not so much that dub was really techno-reggae.

It had grown as a market to the point that Bovell wrote dub pieces, as opposed to the more common practice of remixing the instrumental tracks of existing songs. That allowed Bovell more freedom, but he kept his sonic explorations tightly focused, rarely using all his production tricks on a song when one or two would do.