No Protection

UK dub producer and engineer Mad Professors’ dub version of Massive Attack’s second album was an extremely successful reworking that transformed the original into a deep, powerful, grinding dub / electronic adventure. Mad Professor took the soulful, melancholy and introspective tracks of the original apart and abstracted them, emphasising some elements, subduing others, rebuilding them using his studio as an instrument. He lays the dub reggae effects on thick, rebounding echos and delays flow around the headphones, sounds are placed in huge reverberating spaces and there’s depth and distance in the gaps between the synthetic and sampled audio. Mad Professor continually locates either the precise location of the groove or the true shape of the emotion in each song and then brings his chosen elements to the fore. A dub album superbly done.