THE MAD PROFESSOR & ARIWA SOUNDS STUDIO: One of the only two studio-owning reggae labels to survive in the UK for any length of time is ARIWA ( the other is Fashion), the succes of Ariwa sounds can be put down to the determination of one man, Neil Fraser. Guyana - born Fraser started Ariwa as a four track operation in his livingroom in Thorton Heath, South London in 1979, prompted by a lifelong love of electronics and reggae plus an interest in the sweet sounds of lovers rock, which were close enough to the Philly Soul he also loved to make Fraser want to get involved. The first recordings, including the debut of the late lovers' legend Deborah Glasgow, can be found in "The Early Sessions" album. By 1982 Fraser had moved premises to Peckham, working on at first eight, and subsequently sixteen-track equipment. Styling himself as the Mad Professor, and calling his band The Sane Immates, Fraser rapidly acquired a reputation for excentric, attentiongrabbing records. Though his influences could clearly be discerned, his mixes soon revealed a quality of their own, to a point where an Ariwa recording could be easily differentiated from all others. His " Dub Me Crazy" series, eventually running into double figures, won him a reputation in the alternative rock scene, and John Peel was an early champion, frequently spinning his productions. Early albums with Tony Benjamin, Sergeant Pepper and Ranking Ann did not sell especially well on the reggae market, but were always out-of-the-ordinary or worthy of note. By 1984 Fraser had teamed up with Sandra Cross, a lovers rock singer and sister of Victor Cross, an early Ariwa Sessioneer. The siblings had worked together as The Wild Bunch, an Ariwa album act, before Sandra,a sweet-voiced, confident singer, proved capable of delivering Ariwa the hits it was seeking. Her " Country Life " (1985), built around a string of hits, including a cover of The Stylistics' " Country Living" (previously covered in the reggae idiom by the Mighty Diamonds) was something of a commercial breakthrough. Other albums from Jamaican singer Johnny Clark, and DJs Peter Culture and Pato Banton brought further acclaim, and the open-minded Fraser began to work with acts as diverse as UK indies and sound ssystem legend Jah Shaka. Wolverhampton - based DJ Macka B's debute album " Sign Of The Times " (1986), was the strongest Ariwa release yet, and remains perhaps the most effective roots statement ever recorded in the UK. A move to West Norwood found Fraser the boss of the largest black-owned studio complex in the UK, with two consoles, one a powerfull, outboardlittered twenty-four track. It was here he fashioned some of his most wonderfull lovers rock records, including John McLean's " If I Give My Heart To You ", Sandra Cross' " Best Friend's Man " and Kofi's vival of her own earlier hit, " I'm In Love With A Dreadlocks " Fraser also attracted some heavyweight Jamaican names to his premises, including Bob Andy, U-Roy, Yabba You and Lee "Scratch" Perry. (With new, second album for Ariwa coming up : " Black Ark Experryments" and seperate dub album) He did not neglect his excentric side though, cutting strange tunes such as Professor Doppler's " Doppler Effect ", and " Echoes Of Deaf Journalists ". Altough more recent times have not seen the Mad Professor dominating the UK reggae charts with quite such regularity (Fraser has always shied away from the guns 'n sex sound of ragga), he retains huge respect and a loyal following worldwide. Regular Ariwa jaunts from New York to Holland, Australia to Poland, France to Japan, and elsewhere have ensured strong exports sales for his unique talents. Recently the Mad Professor introduced a new series of dub albums with Lee "Scratch" Perry, entitled " Super Ape inna Jungle" , " Black Ark Experryments " and " Experryments at the Grass Roots of Dub ". The Professor also just released a brand new lover rock album with June Lodge " Lover for all Seasons " and the newest release from his hand is the album " Babylon Kingdom Must Fall " by U-Roy. ------------------- It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Professor Take a lesson from the genius of Nineties dub. By Joshua Green Although England's Mad Professor claims to be sane, his many albums offer an argument to the contrary. The leading practitioner of dub music, an instrumental outgrowth of reggae that's known for its studio effects, he makes music that's thoroughly, wonderfully berserk. Mixing is in the Professor's blood: This native of Guyana (born Neil Frazer) is the son of a traveling druggist and chemist. But gadgets, not pharmaceuticals, were his first love. "When I was eight years old I built my first radio," he recalls. "That's when people started calling me the Mad Professor. People thought it was strange having a young boy getting into radios and electronics instead of going out to play football. They thought I was a madman." Before he could be recruited by, say, the U. S. Department of Defense, however, the Professor discovered reggae. "I was just into reggae strong--very, very strong. That's when I thought I should become a singer. But when I recorded my voice and heard it back, I thought, 'No, I'd better leave the singing alone.'" Instead, Mad Professor became a dedicated fan, devoting himself to learning about the early reggae and rock-steady sounds of artists such as Prince Buster, U-Roy, Ken Booth and Lee Perry. Then, one day in 1972, he discovered dub music. For the Professor, it was an epiphany. "There were some B-sides that King Tubby was mixing," he explains. "It didn't have much echo, just reverb, but the electronics in the song were stepping out more than normal, and they were much more acute, more sharp--and it just had a terrific effect on me. It had no words, no nothing, but it was saying a lot. And I thought, 'Oh, I must learn more about this music.'" In retrospect, it's only natural that the Professor was drawn to dub, a style that combines reggae and studio wizardry. Tubby, a studio engineer for U-Roy, was the innovator of the genre. During the late Sixties and early Seventies, the B-sides of 45 rpm singles released in Jamaica were used only to test sound levels. But rather than wasting this space, the King filled it with versions of the A-side cut that he distorted by alternately phasing the bass and vocal in and out and by adding echo and delay. His experiments proved wildly popular with the proprietors of Jamaican sound systems. Before long, a new type of music had come to life. In 1979 Mad Professor began adding to dub's legacy. "I started my own little studio in my house in London," he reveals. "I built my console, the board, and I built a lot of effects. Phaser, reverb, echo--I built them all myself, because I had no money to buy them. Besides, growing up with electronics, you really get a sense of what they can do." The first product from this studio was Dub Me Crazy, his debut long-player, as well as the first of what wound up being a twelve-record set of Mad Professor dub. Its success established Great Britain as the first dub hotbed outside of Jamaica. "That was a real fun album for me," the Professor notes. "The tape machine that I was using was a 16-track: two-inch Ampex, a real heavy machine with lots of bass." The disc also established the Professor's sonic trademark: More Is Better. Unlike King Tubby, who was forced by circumstances into becoming a dub minimalist (he seldom had more than four tracks to work with), Mad Professor utilized practically every open space, heavily foregrounding the bass and drums and using his homemade gizmos to fragment voices, dissolve strands of sound and incorporate noises and instrumentation that had never been heard in reggae. Jah Shaka Meets Mad Professor, the Professor's seminal 1983 collaboration with fellow British dub pioneer Jah Shaka, a militant, Afrocentric multi-instrumentalist, further solidified his reputation as an innovative producer. "Soon after that, people began asking me to do things," he says. "I thought, 'Okay, let me give it a try,' and we tried with different artists like Tony Benjamin and Sergeant Pepper. We just put together loads of different things, and some of them made the grade of being issued, and some of those were quite successful. And then it grew, and it led me to other artists who asked me to do other things. Next thing I know, I'm running a record label." Mad Professor's Ariwa imprint quickly became known as one of England's most prolific labels: To date, its owner has created or produced 131 albums featuring worthy talents such as Pato Banton, Wild Bunch, Macka B, U-Roy, Yellowman and Lee Perry. In addition, pop artists like the Orb, Sade, KLF and even Rancid have flocked to Ariwa to have their albums sliced and diced. An altered version of Protection, a 1993 CD by Britain's Massive Attack, demonstrates why such a wide variety of acts have turned to the Professor. "I basically did a remix of their album, and the dub album was called No Protection," the Professor explains. "Their version was popular, but I think what my version did is, it came at the right time to show people about this thing called dub." In fact, No Protection outsold the original release--a fact that the Professor chalks up to unexpected compatibility: "They had that trip-hop, college-kid scene, the crossover scene, and I guess I was a guy more from the reggae background that they needed to come bang with. I guess in that sense, we were ideal for each other." Since that time, dub has been embraced as dance music by devotees of other forward-looking musical approaches, including techno and trance. In the Professor's view, this breakthrough makes perfect sense. "Dub is like the uncharted territory of music. Everything hit hard: commercial reggae, hip-hop, trip-hop. But with dub, it was like some people had no respect for dub for years. They always regarded it as the kind of music you just make to fill in space when you had a gap. But that was really the wrong way to look at it. The evidence was there. Then people got bored with everything else. And because of the interest in techno and jungle--and both techno and jungle were actually drawn from dub--people then got into this dub thing. And the whole thing just grew and grew and grew." Throughout this evolution, Mad Professor has tried to push into unexplored territory--and he's used technology to help him do it. His studio now boasts 24-track analog machines, DAT players, 16-track analog tape machines and more effects machines than are found at many major Hollywood sound facilities. As a result, his job has become that much more complex. "With all these effects on the market now, a lot of dub is more digital and clinical-sounding," he complains. "It doesn't necessarily feel as good as it used to. So I think that the average dub producer has got to work a lot harder to make it sound as natural as it used to. But it's definitely still possible." New Decade of Dub, a followup to the 1983 Jah Shaka opus, illustrates his point. The album highlights the drums and bass as usual, but songs like "Morphing Dub" also contain heavy blasts of echo, wildly reverbed drum kits and Doppler sirens swirled into a truly mind-bending brew. Even more impressive is "Natural Roots." Shaka contributes mesmerizing Nyahbinghi drum lines throughout the piece, while the Professor creates dense walls of sonic distortion, programmed break beats and deconstructed synthesizer chord progressions. The resulting sound is so cohesive that you'd think the two had been playing together for years. Another new effort from the Professor--Black Liberation Dub, the third offering in his "Evolution of Dub" series--is more politically charged, in large part because Louis Farrakhan's booming voice is heard throughout it. "Music ought to communicate with people," the Professor maintains. "I must give some kind of message, because that's the whole idea behind dub music." He adds, "I think Farrakhan is to the Nineties what Martin Luther King was to the Sixties and what Marcus Garvey was to the Twenties and Thirties." While it's possible to disagree with that assessment, there's no denying that the Professor's use of Farrakhan's words (lifted from his "Million Man March" speech) is extraordinarily powerful. The soundscape across which these phrases float is largely computer-generated, but it never takes on the cold, life-less feel of rote techno. The elephantine bass on tracks like "Cosmic Ray," for instance, is accented by approximations of classical violins and flutes. The work of a kook? Perhaps--but we should all be so loony.