Jah plus Atari

A Casio preset, an Atari cartridge, and a netlabel in Leipzig.

Back in 2008, I saw a record on a label called Jahtari for sale at the online shop Boomkat, and I added it to my cart before hearing a single note.

The name is what grabbed me. Jah + Atari. I understood instantly what they were going for. I bought a stack of the label’s records on the strength of a pun and I didn’t regret it.

The preset

But first, let’s go back to 1986, when I first discovered the connection between reggae and digital.

I first heard Sleng Teng in a Jamaican patty shop in the Snowdon neighbourhood of Montreal, and I made the connection immediately: the sound coming out of the speakers was made of the same stuff as the Radio Shack computer in my bedroom.

While I didn’t know it at the time, what I was hearing was the record where reggae went digital. In 1985 Wayne Smith and King Jammy built a riddim out of a factory preset on a cheap Casio keyboard, and hundreds of versions followed within a couple of years. (Thanks to Riddim-ID, you can check them all out here).

But there’s a lot more to that story.

That preset was programmed in 1980 by a Casio engineer named Hiroko Okuda. It was among the first things she worked on after being hired straight out of music school, where she had written one of the first Japanese graduate theses on reggae. The year before Casio hired her, Bob Marley played his only Japanese tour and she went to several of the shows. You can read more about Okuda here.

So, the rhythm that digitized Jamaican music was created by a reggae obsessive in Tokyo, five years before it reached Kingston. Jammy and Smith didn’t find reggae hiding in a toy keyboard by accident. Someone had already loaded it there.

The machines in the bedroom

The other half of why Jahtari resonated with me also takes us back to the mid-80s. The Atari 2600 was my gaming platform of choice. Some of my friends had Intellivision, but I forgive them.

I did some fairly lame programming on a TRS-80 Color Computer and later a Commodore 64, but I did enough to understand that everything on those machines was about coaxing more out of them than they were built for.

With this in mind, the sound design on the 2600 was extraordinary, given the limitations of the product. And Pitfall II was a high water mark. You played Pitfall Harry, working through the caverns under Machu Picchu, looking for a diamond, his niece, and his cowardly pet mountain lion.

Pitfall II has music running under it continuously, in multiple voices, on a console that had already been on the market for six years. It played in my house for more hours than I care to admit. David Crane made it sound great by designing a custom chip and building it into the game cartridge itself. Three channels plus drums on hardware that shipped with barely two. The video game crash arrived shortly after and no other game ever used the chip.

So the hack was adding extra hardware inside the cartridge because the console wouldn’t give him enough music. This isn’t so different from what King Tubby was doing in the same years with a mixing desk he had modified himself, inventing dub out of a four track studio by treating its limits as the instrument.

Leipzig

Okay, fast forward a couple of decades. Jahtari started in 2004 in Leipzig, run by Jan Gleichmar AKA Disrupt. It began as a netlabel, giving the music away as free downloads, with a founding rule that all of its music would be reggae and dub made with a computer.

The Jahtarian Dubbers compilations are a great introduction to the label. The first three came out between 2008 and 2012 and they’re the clearest statement of what the label is: dub that follows every structural rule of the form, using only 8-bit computers to create the sound. Space, bass, echo, delay all present, but the instruments just happen to be chips.

You’d think this would be a gimmick. It isn’t, because dub was always about what you do when you don’t have enough gear.

There’s a Jahtari sub label called Jahmiga, which the label’s own site calls mysterious and has never bothered to explain. Its first release is a 7” from 2009 called Whiskey Bar, and it’s the track I’ve been playing out. The record doesn’t credit any artist. Collectors have since said the artist is Clause Four. But the catch is that Clause Four was the commitment to common ownership in the British Labour Party’s constitution, until Tony Blair had it taken out in 1995.

The song is a version, too, and one with serious pedigree. Whiskey Bar rebuilds Alabama Song, which The Doors cut in 1967 and which Bertolt Brecht published in 1927. So a label in Leipzig took a German playwright’s lyric, dubbed it, and put it out under a British socialist slogan. Nobody’s name anywhere.

Which brings me back to the name of the label. Leipzig was East Germany, and AMIGA was the East German state record label for forty years. I’ve never seen anyone at the label confirm the connection, but it can’t be a coincidence. Along with nods to Clause Four and Brecht, I don’t think I’m imagining it.

Every time I drop the record somebody comes up to the booth to ask what it is, which tells me I am playing something that matters.

The steep curve

There’s a machine on my desk now called the EP-40 Riddim, made by Teenage Engineering, which is a sampler and sequencer built specifically for reggae and dub. Its sound bank was put together with King Jammy, Mad Professor, and Mafia & Fluxy. So the toy came loaded again. Only this time they did it on purpose, and they hired the people who did it the first time.

I am not good at it. The learning curve is steeper than I expected and I’m not ready to share anything I’ve made with anyone right now. I’m fine with that, because I’m used to playing music, not making it. It’s never too late to start.

Being a beginner puts me in reasonable company. A Casio preset built by a woman who loved reggae, a cartridge with a homemade chip in it, a netlabel in Leipzig giving away dub made on a laptop, and now a small retro orange box that I can’t operate. Sixty years of toy-like machines in the hands of people working out what to do with them.

the playlist

I put together playlist to go with this one. It opens with King Tubby getting more out of a four track than anyone thought was in there, runs through Sleng Teng and the digital records that came after, and then spends a while in Leipzig. Whiskey Bar isn't on it, because it isn't on streaming anywhere. That's the YouTube link above.

Thanks for reading and listening.

Sandy