What do you do when you already have a cracking song and want to make it cracking-er? You get in someone who is not only one of the most inventive and subversive bass players of modern times but has a track record of reinvention and off the wall remixing, particularly when that reinvention requires explorations through the realms of dub. Jah Wobble.
Falun Gong Dancer is a gorgeously simple and emotively resonant song in its original form, already, in the words of Cathal Coughlan, “a high-point of the first Telefís album, but in this version, it goes somewhere else entirely, thanks to JW’s signature contribution”
If the original take is the sonic and visual telling of the ancestral trek that runs from rural Ireland to the dancehalls, pubs and crowded rented rooms of tough uncompromising London, the two new versions add an additional and unexpected cultural music element, that of the dub sound. Two re-mixes have been born from this collaboration. The first adds drifting sonics and distant voices, gentle dub grooves and heightens the sense of melancholy that already oozed from the original. The second version steps things up slightly, though only slightly, throws in some beguiling electronica and allows more space for the beats to do their work as if the song has been teased apart to allow more room for atmospheres to pool in the gaps between the musical strokes.
It is enough that Telefís has the ability to produce such great songs in the first place, that they have the forethought and bravery to employ the talents of someone like Jah Wobble and allow him to reinvent the song, shows just how forward-thinking and musically adventurous they are.
