Who are Ticklah and Axelrod and what’s their beef? As it happens, they’re the same person, Victor Axelrod, member of the Antibalis, the Brooklyn-based afrobeat collective and (as Ticklah) co-producer of the novel 2003 Pink Floyd redux Dub Side of the Moon. So, the conflict? It’s all in his head. And considering that Axelrod has drenched these 12 reggae blends in the ech-ech-echo of space-aged dub, it’s clear that the clash he has in mind is one of style – a sound battle between the genre’s two primordial innovators, King Tubby and Lee “Scratch” Perry. Is it a question of the Beatles vs the Stones? Is dub similarly irreconcilable? Is Axelrod taking sides between Perry’s thin and trebly but brilliantly demon-possessed productions and the higher fidelity of Tubby’s more austere, bass-bullying cuts? Can he even do that?

With an alias like Ticklah, it would seem he’s pledged himself to the playfully mad Perry. And yet, the sculpted, cleansed sound of his mixes actually pays a homage to Tubby. As a dub provocateur, Axelrod’s a gifted arranger with a good instinct for making the trippy logical, but he’s also timid. There’s too much minding of Ps and Qs to let his effects rack get really physical. The root of dub’s energy is its on-the-fly imperfections – the abuse of effects and the absence of good taste – and it was a more thrilling ride before it was codified as a discipline and its choppy inner workings could be cleaned up in Pro Tools. For all its sonic warmth and brainpower, Axelrod’s dub is almost too perfect for its own good.

However, there’s certainly more to his peacekeeping mission than a spliff-fumed message of one-dub. Axelrod has a musicologist’s soul, and he draws on everything from salsa to Ethiopian jazz to make his dub a primer on which to paint new, hybrid colors. “Mi Sonsito” and “Si Hecho Palante” effortlessly translate Mariachi phrases into the stuttering pulse of dub-speak as if the two were separated at birth. “Scratch to Win” has a slinky horn riff that recalls the “Peter Gunn” theme before it loses it in the endless reflections of an echo-plated house of mirrors. “Want Not” is an album highlight, with husky guest vocals by Tamark-Kali, and sounds like somebody replaced the lover’s poetry of a Sade tune with a meditation on spiritual impoverishment. Even a less-ambitious track like “Answer Me,” with its rusty, pump-organ figure and spectral vocal moans, has its own low-key appeal.

As writer, producer and mixer all-in-one, Axelrod’s command of so many roles is impressive. Still, there’s something anemic, almost incestuous, about his being both the constructor and the deconstructor. It’s hubris to assume he has the potential to create both sides of the dub coin. However it’s not as a classicist, but in his blending of so many foreign perspectives with the dub worldview, where Axelrod finds his greatest successes. And in that battle at least, between musics once thought incompatible, Axelrod – both versions of him – come out winning.

By: Daniel Johnson