“In the UK, there is this art of classifying things,” says Gavin Blair, who records as Gavsborg, over a video call from his flat in Berlin. “I’ll say something like, ‘Cool jungle tune!’ and somebody else’ll be like, ‘That’s not jungle, that’s…’” He looks down, fishing around for something a more niche term like “hardcore jungle,” “ragga jungle,” or even “intelligent jungle”—the sort of subgenres that lurk in the depths of subreddit forums. “If Jamaica was the UK, we would have had like 16 new genres in the last year alone,” he laughs, referring to the country where he used to live before relocating to Berlin. “But we don’t do [that kind of labeling] in Jamaica.” It’s this freedom from any tags or labels that led Blair and friend Jordan Chung (Time Cow) to produce the massively influential dancehall record—sorry, “mutant dancehall” record—Bird Sound Power, because they weren’t trying to fit into any obscure subgenre; they were just making music.
Despite the sparky energy of his productions, Blair isn’t one to romanticize. He leans back in his chair for the duration of our call, relaxed and confident; it’s easy to imagine him as a teen walking up to a friend at school and declaring, “I can make better beats than you.” Which he did—and he could. In fact, he became the best producer at Excelsior, a large school in Kingston with children between the ages of 11 and 20, with a long line of schoolmates paying him to make rhythm tracks for them to sing over. He and some friends also started a rap collective, Equiknoxx, which would later become a platform to release music. From there, things moved quickly; no sooner was he making beats for mates than he was producing the rhythm track “Step Out” for dancehall artist Busy Signal. (The credits of the original 7-inch on the Discogs page say it’s written by Egninox. Blair explains how Greensleeves later signed the tune for the album of the same name.) “It was a light,” he puts it modestly, dispelling any ideas that it was life-changing. “It was something to show your mum and your dad like, ‘Here’s an actual thing.’”
The early ‘00s were arguably the toughest time to be making music in Jamaica. There were few record shops and even fewer pressing plants. To get noticed, Blair had to walk up and down Mountain View and Vineyard in East Kingston, knocking on studio doors. “Jamaica is not a walking country, so if you’re doing something that involves walking, you know you’re going pretty hard,” he recalls. Sometimes, he would be welcomed with a plate of food; other times, he would be chased out. Whatever happened, it was always better than being at home, he says. “Home was the worst place you could be. If you’re at home, nothing’s happening.”
The studios were where you went to hear the latest riddim and to share your music with those deemed good enough to get inside. The thing that helped Blair stand out from the crowd was the fact that he had a printer at home, so he could give his tracks interesting, memorable names. When he gave his CD to a producer walking out of the studio, the tracklist would double as an icebreaker, and perhaps buy him some time to convince them why they should listen to it.
Before long, though, Blair’s computer kicked the bucket. “I was overloading the poor Fruity Loops. I was just doing too much,” he moans. He had to swallow his pride and go groveling to Ricardo Martin (aka Jimmy The Tucan), one of the kids he’d told many moons ago, “I can make better beats than you.” He began splitting his time between producing at Martin’s house and walking to the studio to hand out CDs—half of the tracks his own productions, the other half Martin’s. “It was cool because Martin’s tracks had a different vibe to my tracks,” he recalls. “So some people might like my vibe and not his, or they might like his vibe and not like mine. At the end of the day, we’d always get somebody interested.”
When Martin moved to Canada, Blair was left flying the Equiknoxx flag solo, before Nick Deane, who had been a part of Equiknoxx back at school, returned to the fold. “That’s when things really started to pick up steam,” says Blair. The two went from lingering outside the studio to having their own studio time. “I’m looking at these guys by the gate where I used to be [and saying], ‘Excuse me, we have a 9 P.M. session, sir,’” he laughs, waving his hands to mimic wading through people to get inside the studio.
Studio time brought fresh challenges. Producers with more musical experience were quick to correct Blair’s self-taught approach One friend, who came from a classically-trained background, couldn’t get his head round Blair’s utter disregard for pitch, playing notes in and around semitones rather than on them. “He’s telling me it sounds out of tune, and I’m like, ‘But it sounds good though!’” And someone else thought so, too. Upon leaving the studio, Blair bumped into dancehall producer Daniel “Blaxxx” Lewis, who had been listening to the recording session from outside. “He was like, ‘Yo, that was hard,’” Blair smiles. “And that was one of my best moments ever. I was like, ‘Nobody can chat to me knowing that Blaxxx said my stuff sounds good.’”
Blaxxx changed dancehall, Blair believes. “For a good six or seven years, the ‘boof bap’ or the ‘voop voop’ was the template. If you did anything outside of that, it’s like, ‘That’s not dancehall.’ Blaxxx was one of the first to push the tempo up to like 105-110 BPM, so instead of [the beat] going, ‘um-um,’ it would go, ‘um [pauses] um.’” You can hear this distance in Blaxxx’s two iconic riddims, the “Blackout” riddim and the “Egyptian” riddim. The tempo is at 120 and 114 BPM, respectively, and the pulse lands on every other beat, making space for the melody to wind between. When you compare it to other producers Blair grew up listening to—like Steven “Lenky” Marsden and Ward 21, who pioneered the “Diwali” and “Bada Bada” riddims, respectively—it sounds completely unique, more like rap composition sprinkled with sound system dynamics. Which is something you could also say of Bird Sound Power.
“It’s got these synth pads that sound like they’re off a Coil record, then the fills sound like something you’d hear on a trap record. And then you’ve got that Jacob Miller sample from ‘Healing Of The Nation,’” says Jon Kraus, aka Jon K, over the phone. He sounds just as excited as he probably was almost a decade ago when he first came across Blair’s track “I Really Want To Write On Her Purple Wall” and shared it with Sean Canty and Miles Whittaker of Demdike Stare. Kraus points to art pop records like The Free Design’s “The Symbols Ring,” and ’70s public safety ads, and explains how Blair and Chung poured all of this into their musical melting pot. And somehow made it work. “They’re not thinking about labels,” he says. “They’re just messing around; whatever the idea they get—it seems like they just have a knack for finding a way of getting that through the speaker.”
Kraus has a long relationship with Blair and Chung, helping compile the Jamaican duo’s record Colón Man and then releasing Writings Ov Tomato on MAL, the label he runs with DJ and partner Elle Andrews. For that Tomato, Kraus, and Andrews wanted to give Blair and Chung free rein to explore styles they might not have explored under the Equiknoxx banner. “It was one of those instances where you realize you’re being a bit naive about it,” Kraus laughs. “What they do with Equiknoxx is so un-pigeonhole-able that they didn’t need us to tell them to do something left-field.”
A scroll through Blair’s recent releases on EquiknoxxMusic proves this. As he’s matured, the parameters of what he considers experimental have only gotten wider. Now, besides blending dancehall with techno, electro, trap, and post-punk, he also makes bluesy dub music with Isis Semaj-Hall, aka Riddim Writer.
Semaj-Hall, a dub scholar who lectures at the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica, met Blair at Anchor Studios in Kingston in 2018. She remembers being taken aback by how much he knew about dub. The two quickly became friends, and by 2019, they were working on a project where they gathered field recordings and collaborated with Kumina drummer, Nicholas Allen, to “tell a story of word – sound – power,” which they presented at The Asafu Yard in Charles Town.
Their project reveals parts of Jamaican culture that Blair had been meaning to incorporate into his music for a long time, “But the right time and person to do it with only presented itself with Riddim Writer,” he says. The record celebrates belief systems like Obeah and Kumina, which have been outlawed since colonial times and have never really been integrated back into society. Together, Blair and Semaj-Hall attended a Kumina dance to experience what it was like for themselves. “Our trod to St Thomas to take in some Kumina drumming was a joy!” says Semaj-Hall, “Surely, we poured some of that experience into Working Progress.”
Working Progress was self-released via EquiknoxxMusic, rounding off several independent releases for Blair—many of which have been made with fellow Jamaicans. He denies any intention behind this, though does admit that Jamaicans “get it” quicker, which makes the music-making process smoother. “I might come across an artist in Berlin and like what they’re doing, but there’s just too much planning [before getting started]. The time it’s going to take for us to get into the studio I’m like, ‘It’s too long. Why are you telling me about something two months away? By the time you’re ready, I’ve moved on!’” he laughs. “I’ll be a metal producer!”
He jokes but, you wouldn’t put it past him—he’s a sponge. One moment he’s rewriting the rules of dancehall, the next, he’s making a dub folk record, or recording his own spoken word and rap album. We call him a dancehall producer to try and make sense of it, or perhaps because “producer” just seems too thin a descriptor for someone whose creativity knows no bounds.
Dive into this sampler to get an idea of what Blair’s been up to recently.
Groundsound
Working Progress
Working Progress is the debut dub album from Groundsound, a collaborative project between Blair and Isis Semaj-Hall, aka Riddim Writer. Semaj-Hall explains how the record—which has touches of blues, folk, and even house music—celebrates the skills, resilience, and practices shown by Jamaicans in order to survive enslavement. On “Visa,” Semaj-Hall plays the role of a border control officer interrogating Blair, who eventually rises above it all with a simple and sweet refrain: “Me need a visa to speak to ya.” As Groundsound, Semaj-Hall, and Blair address weighty themes with authority and humor.
Unkle G
an honest meal
Unkle G lands somewhere between beat tape, hip-hop record, and a diary of studio life. “There was never really a time when something really hurt me, and my curiosity didn’t take over,” explains Blair of his time trying to make it as a producer. “It’s like, ‘Oh, that door’s closed—what’s in the other room?” On the record, he reflects on the early days of his career, when he was walking studio to studio (“hypervigilant”) and navigating rejection at the hands of Jamaican superstars (“Popcaan said my riddims aren’t good”). As with Working Progress, Blair’s deadpan delivery keeps the mood humble and light. “It’s important to make my position clear: I’m not ranting about what could have been, I’m just sharing what happened.”
Gavsborg
1 Hour Service
Cassette
This mixtape is essentially Blair’s debut solo album, and it couldn’t be more fitting that Blair would drop it out of nowhere, with little to no press. 1 Hour Service shows the breadth of Blair’s sound: “Coming To You Grey” is a soul tune; “The Jamaican Manifesto Pesto” is trap; “Mighty God of Daniel” is dubstep; and Jon K’s favorite. “She Sings Something,” is an atmospheric and beatless dancehall tune toying with whomping acid synth lines and light percussion. Blair explains how this will be part of a recurring tape series—Cassette Blair—where artists will be invited to share music they’ve been working on.
PYNE
“Pum Pum Poetry” (feat. Gavsborg)
Canadian producer PYNE is forging her own style of dancehall she calls femmehall which, as the blurb for “Pum Pum Poetry” describes it, is “a more feminine approach to dancehall production and performance.” In addition to producing the tune, Blair provides a catchy baritone refrain—“hey gyal”—that pops up between the wide plod of the track’s kick drum. Its rhythm has a lot in common with Blaxx’s “Egyptian” and “Blackout” riddims: The tempo is higher than traditional dancehall (120BPM), the pulse landing on every other beat, and the vocals have the soul of R&B rather than the innuendo of OG dancehall’s slack lyrics.
GAV & JORD
Writings Ov Tomato
Vinyl LP
Although Kraus admits that he and Andrews were naïve in giving Blair and Chung license to “be more experimental,” a small part of him does wonder if it had the desired effect. “Pig Pilot” sounds like Kowton’s functional techno tune “Balance,” with a bleeping metronome that’s uncharacteristically stiff and minimal for what many have come to expect from Blair and Chung. And “A Yow Jon K” is the most electro the two have ever sounded. Maybe all that touring around America and Europe following the success of Bird Sound Power did have something to do with this fresh artistic direction.
