I once again missed this year’s LA Rumble, one of the few clashes happening on the west coast. An audio recording of the action is available over at Massive Productions website. Haven’t had time to listen to it yet, but it should be interesting.

By accident I actually ended up at the same venue as where the clash went down just the week before (The Joint, down in mid-Wilshire territory somewhere). It wasn’t reggae night though, instead I got to witness Dizzy Reed — you may know him as the keyboard player from Guns & Roses — and his band “Hookers and Blow” perform some classic rock covers. Class act. How can anyone not love Los Angeles? You can’t make stuff like that up.

June turned into a roots reggae month. I picked up three Blood & Fire classics I didn’t own before and that for some reason suddenly showed up at Ernie B’s: “The Heart of The Congos” on original double vinyl, the Big Youth triple-CD “Natty Universal Dread”, and Yabby U’s “Jesus Dread” in its mighty quadruple-LP box set incarnation (I got number 45 of 1000). It’s so cool that I almost don’t dare to touch it.

But there’s more exciting roots stuff on the way. Pressure Sounds’ new release looks nice. I don’t know anything about the Micron label, but it’s got a track called “Revolution Is For The Chinaman”. That’s something.

Even better: Shanachie’s new “The Mystic World Of Augustus Pablo: The Rockers Story” contains 4 CD’s and a live concert DVD. The track list looks great - 65 cuts total with three versions of “Cassava Piece”. There are few Jamaican musicians that I rate higher than Pablo, so this sounds like it’ll be a real treat. Nobody deserves a serious compilation like this more than him.

Now back to the European cup…

From the LA Times:

“The interest seems to be catching on. Turntable sales are picking up, and the few remaining record pressers say business is booming.”

Just cleared of gun charges, Mavado pulls a Hillary and delivers an endorsement of Obama. Unlike Hillary he does it in the form of a version of “On The Rock”, remade to “We need Barack”. The Heatwave blog links to the mp3. First time I’ve heard references to the US mortgage crisis in a bashment track.

I’m hoping for more in this style. Pretty much anything with the work “rock” in it would work (”Waterhouse Barack”, “Gangsta Barack”, “Prison Oval Barack”), but what we really need is Sister Nancy to do “O-bam-bam-a”.

It may not have been as inventive as the effect-laden stuff from the seventies, but “Dangerous Dub” is one of the heaviest records I know. Originally released in 1981 it featured Jah Screw productions, with King Tubby and Soldgie engineering, and the Roots Radics hammering out the riddims. All completely stripped down drum and bass and very little else. One of my favorite dub albums for sure.

Greensleeves recently released a follow-up, “Roots Radics Meets King Tubby - More Dangerous Dub”. It goes in the same style, but the riddims here are more well-known — it’s mainly classics like “African Beat”, “Dub Organizer”, “Darker Shade Of Black”, and “Here I Come” that get worked out. I’d say it’s a bit less exciting than the first chapter just because of that, but whatever. The sound is crisp and the bass is loud. The Roots Radics are always fantastic — I never miss an opportunity to praise their genius — and while Jah Screw is not a guy whose name gets mentioned a lot, he’s been behind plenty of good things (Greensleeves has a nice biography up on him right now, check it out here). Let’s just say you need this one too.

Speaking of underrated: Wycliff “Steely” Johnson is listed as the keyboard player on “More Dangerous Dub”. Now there’s someone that really needs some more credit. I think it’s about time a label like Pressure Sound or Soul Jazz put together a compilation of Steely and Cleevie tracks. In my book they’re on the top-twenty list of the most important Jamaican producers. They engineered so much of the good stuff at Jammy’s, they did fantastic things in the nineties that still hold up today, and had huge international success with Dawn Penn’s “No, No, No”. Steely’s sound Silverhawk ran things back in the day and is still considered one of the top systems ever. And who could forget when the Street Sweeper riddim was ruling the world? That’s some resume. So if anyone with some kind of record industry influence reads this, you know what to do.

Right now I’m catching up on a couple of old Rephlex releases that I didn’t pay enough attention to when they came out. First up: Soundmurderer and SK-1’s “Rewind Records” compilation, and as you know some serious neo-ragga-breakcore business. I can’t give you any track information, since the two white label LPs come in a blank sleeve, but that’s how the VIP jungle kru rolls, innit? (Sorry. I have no idea what that means. And most likely neither does Soundmurderer, since he’s from Detroit).

So what I can say is that this record is a fine madhouse of breakbeats that could make Squarepusher retire. A constant barrage of snares, grinding Sleng Teng basslines and sampled yelling from old Addies tapes. I have no idea if Soundmurderer is still doing this stuff, his MySpace page crashes my browser — ah, Linux — but hopefully he is. Highly recommended.

Got around to catching the audio for the final UK Cup Clash. The line-up was the usual suspects, with one big exception: Killamanjaro was in, with good old Ricky Trooper at the helm. Can’t beat that combo, right?

Well, actually you can. Trooper played some classics but then ran into the typical “technical difficulties that we shouldn’t hold against him”, resulting in Jaro dropping out around the fourth round. Hearing the serial killer curse out Robbo Ranx afterwards during the post-elimination interview was great though.

But the real reason to check out this clash would be for Mighty Crown spectacular nose-dive during the 45 round. I have heard them give lukewarm performances before, but never play in a way that drives the crowd into a frenzy of boos and “fuck off!”-s.

This was really amazing. None of the gimmicks the Far East Rulers pulled worked, they just managed to piss people off more and more. All Bass Odyssey that came on afterwards had to do was to play one tune to completely shut them down. No need to take a vote to see who went home after that round.

The one-for-one with Rodigan vs Bass Odyssey turned out to be very even and pretty exciting too, actually, so overall this was more interesting than I expected it to be.

So you feel like The Bug sold out? That DJ Scud has started making easy-listening pop records? Then it’s time to head up to grim northern Sweden for the fine Rastafarian power electronics stylings of Danger Hilton (www.myspace.com/realdangerhilton). They sound something like the bastard child of William Bennett and Peter Tosh.

These guys are clearly nuts, but in a very consistent way. Thanks to Petter for the tip.

The best reissue so far from the Deadly Dragon camp comes in the form of an obscure track I had never heard before: Daddy Freddy’s “Bad Boy Patrol”.

Produced by none other than the mighty Fatis Burrell, but far from the neo-roots we love that guy for. This one is much earlier, from back in 1987, and a fast, full on digital riddim. Daddy Freddy keeps up with the pace (of course) and drops some typical reality lyrics. And an added bonus is the impressively quirky dub on the b-side, with dissonant guitar effects sweeping in and out of the mix.

These are limited so grab one quick.

Mad props to the riddim master DJ Algonquin for pointing me to the trailer for the new Grand Theft Auto game, which features Mavado’s old track “The Real McCoy”. The vocals have the phrase “Liberty City” added so they must have been recut especially for the game. That’s what we call a successful dubplate business.

Wait for the anti-violent-video-game lobby to hear about Mavado’s latest run-ins with the law and blame it on his XBox.