King Tubby

This collection by one of dub reggae’s most important innovators is a frustratingly packaged retrospective. Tubby’s career spanned nearly thirty years, from the time this radio repairman started working as a sound engineer in the 1960s and devised ingenious ways to reinvent and extend hit records for the dance floor up until his murder in 1989. For that reason, this music offers real insight into a vision that not only helped create its own genre but also influenced hip-hop, punk and contemporary dance music. But though some of these records clearly come from the crucial early ’60s and ’70s period, without liner notes that provide recording and release dates, the history lesson offered here is a guessing game that will bear fruit only with an exhaustive Internet search.

That said, this collection is brilliant. Tubby’s playful shifts in tone and volume, the repetition of key sounds and the fading in and out of various keyboard, guitar, drum and snare sounds — all the key qualities of dub music — achieve a freshness that indicates someone playing with new ideas for the first time. Free of the need to replicate a style, Tubby’s sonic revolutions hit listeners in unexpected ways.