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"I've always been a listener," says Boland. "I'm less of an ego person. I definitely like to turn people on to other music and represent my tastes, but I'm more about appreciating music, as opposed to trying to develop a personality behind the decks. ... Personality DJs are cool, but for me it's all about liking all styles of music and being able to share that, just vibing on it, you know?"
The album reflects his hey-you've-gotta-hear-this sensibility. Using some of the Bay Area's brightest rising talents (as well as one or two from outside the city limits), J. Boogie's Dubtronic Science works like a sampler of what you might hear trickling out of the city's better clubs on any given Saturday night. "Movin' to My Beat," featuring L.A. rappers People Under the Stairs, is a smooth-rolling hip hop tune as suave as anything by Slum Village. "Rainfall," washed with Omega's cool alto, offers a Pacific Rim answer to the Afro-Caribbean neo-soul of "Black Atlantic." And "La Sangre" and "Oceanic Lullaby," pouring French lounge cool over stark, rim shot-strafed funk beats, show Boland's debt to the instrumental hip hop of England's Mo'Wax label. The glue that holds it all together is dub. No matter what Boland piles on top -- resonant Rhodes chords, a slowly rotating sitar line, buoyant horns -- reggae's rock-steady bass drops underpin every bar, kicking up swirls of delay that wrap the album cozily in the history of Jamaican studio science.
But J. Boogie's Dubtronic Science -- the group shares the name of the album -- isn't solely a studio project. While his vocalists rotate, Boland has assembled a cast of live performers to re-create his experiments onstage. Playing alongside an unusual ensemble that includes drums, trumpet, sitar, and clavinet, Boland tests the limits of the DJ's role on turntables, sampler, keyboard, and effects. "Once you bring live musicians in the mix, you can start to interact with people on a new dimension," says Boland. Appropriately, the album's strongest tracks stress the talents of his collaborators. The jazzy "Curiosity" stands out for Gina Rene's sultry, soulful vocals, but it rides on the fluid rhythms of percussionist Carlos Ariaza, whose looped conga lines offer an unusual blend of the played and the programmed.
"It's all about kidnapping musicians," admits Boland. It's a good thing he's got accomplished session players -- including trumpeter Todd Simon, of respected funk outfits Antibalas, Breakestra, and Sharon Jones' Dap-Kings -- since rehearsal happens mainly at sound check. The group is less about polished routines than improvisational verve; a soul-savvy jam band, perhaps.
Dubtronic Science represents an interesting mutation in turntable culture, because it's less focused on re-creating J. Boogie's own compositions than on scribbling in the margins of recorded music. "I'm setting the pace with a DJ set," explains Boland, "and the musicians are improvising off the turntables. If I'm playing a beat, the drummer will enhance that. But I could drop that beat out and just let them go -- it's not like I'm just scratching over these guys." With Boland's debut album in the can, the group is starting to play out live versions of the recorded songs, but Boland's low-key, self-effacing attitude has shaped the act's MO. "We're just a dance party," explains Boland. "We want you to move."
Despite the risks inherent in such on-the-fly live sets, they represent the most ambitious aspects of J. Boogie's Dubtronic Science, challenging Boland and company to play off but also against each other, using the tensions of battle culture to break down the unflappable cool of rare groove. In contrast, the ensemble can come off too smoothly on record. Part of this may result from the album's home on local label Om, which emphasizes a jazzy/sexy/cool image in its releases and parties. But Dubtronic Science's comfort-dub may suggest that Boland's own tastes, while admirably broad, are out of step with current developments in electronic music. If smoothness ruled the mid-'90s, rupture reigns today, from the shotgun marriages of homemade "bootlegs," or mash-ups, to the tumbledown dance rock of disco-punk bands like Crack: We Are Rock and the Rapture.
Although Boland has roots in hip hop, soul, and dub reggae, J. Boogie's Dubtronic Science is curiously devoid of any of the tensions that fueled those genres. Name a classic release from any of those forms, and chances are the music is as political as it is funky. Where there's not a radical politics at work, you can bet there's a radical sonics. But Dubtronic Science, for all its roots-oriented production, seems rootless, as though dub had become a strangely sourceless echo of its former self.
The difficulty of creating groove-oriented music that doesn't lapse into the "lifestyle" category -- where a soulful patina conveys only the trappings of cool -- is evident in the fact that one of J. Boogie's compilation tracks turned up on a commercial airline's chill-out channel. Boland was unaware of the deal until a friend brought him the in-flight magazine with the track listing. "I thought that was fucking hilarious," he says, noting that the money doesn't hurt, even though he hasn't mastered the art of getting paid. But it's worth wondering if creating make-out music necessarily means getting in bed with advertisers and multinational corporations.
In 2003, of course, soul is no longer the exclusive realm of the raised-fist brigade; soul is largely where you find it, and J. Boogie's productions have admittedly got it in spades. But the preponderance of branded cool in the Bay Area and beyond suggests that affect is replacing the sly, sullen, darker-than-blue emotional range of the soul and reggae originators. This isn't to charge J. Boogie with complacency; a tune like the instrumental "Do What You Love" comes off like a joyous response to being cut loose from the dot-com ranks. But dark days sometimes call for a feistier response than candle-lit, heavy-lidded funk.
