- The elusive artist's first album in 20 years is a masterclass in slow-burning funk.
- Ready for a bit of dance music trivia? Can you name the producer who had his own Basic Channel sub-label, featured on commercial mixes for Sven Väth and Steve Bug and collaborated with Moderat on the final release in their vaunted 50 Weapon Series? As unlikely a Venn diagram as that might be, these are just a few of the entries on Paul St. Hilaire's 30-year CV. After moving to Berlin from Dominica in 1994, he became an instrumental part of the city's fledgling reggae community, before connecting with Mark Ernetsus and Moritz von Oswald and laying down the vocals on their Acting Crazy 12-inch (as Round Three). This gave birth to a new force in dub techno: Tikiman.
Although St. Hilaire shies away from taking too much credit (he described his records as coming "from the stars" in a 2021 RA profile), it's impossible to deny the momentous impact he's had (and continues to have) on dub techno. Approaching the sound from a roots perspective, his records are soft and warm, glowing like smouldering embers. The rest of the dub world quickly caught on. St. Hilaire continued to collaborate with the Basic Channel crew, but also linked with Deadbeat, Stereotyp and countless others. Three decades in, it's not a stretch to call St. Hilaire the patron saint of dub techno.
All these collaborations mean that St. Hilaire hasn't released a solo effort since 2006's Adsom - A Divine State Of Mind. That LP was the final record on his label False Tuned, where he'd gradually moved from dub techno to making more traditional roots reggae. The news, then, that his first solo album in nearly 20 years would be named Tikiman Vol. 1, was both unexpected and tantalising, especially for the dub techno heads. Better still: Tikiman Vol. 1 delivers. For me, it's the most complete insight into St. Hilaire's singular take on dub we've ever heard.
Tikiman Vol. 1 presents the perfect snapshot of St. Hilaire's dubwise sensibilities. On the one hand, you have throwbacks to his Rhythm & Sound collaborations. The sultry grooves of "The Weather Man" and "Little Way" would be right at home on 1998's Showcase. But the album's hi-fi finish pushes the envelope: the synthesiser bleeps are just a bit spacier, the basslines a bit more aqueous, almost like a Sex Tags Mania or Acido release. As well as techno, there are also some rich, dub-infused reggae tracks. "Bright One" has the faintest hit of dub chords, but the track is really just delay hiss, a simple drum loop and his voice. Things are fuller on "In Fortis" and "Keep Safe." The former, a version cut, has particularly thick and fuzzy guitar strums, while the latter's dancehall groove reaches for nearly spiritual bliss (and has a Slash-worthy guitar solo).
While the album is a convincing display of his production chops, it'd be hard to talk about a St. Hilaire record without mentioning the vocals. His lyrics have always been enigmatic—if not vaguely mystical—and here he's true to form, blurring the lines between the political and the personal (a template he perfected early in his career with "What A Mistry"). Listened to one way, "The Weather Man" is about "staying home today" due to rain. But the impending storm, outlined by the crashing minor chords, gives the song an allegorical weight. By the time he sings, "The weather man is tired of the nonsense," the text has morphed into a meditation on the impending climate crisis. There is a similar feel to the transient musings of "Bedroom In My Bag," where another storm appears on the horizon threatening to wash the vagabond away.
The cultural theorist Isis Semaj-Hall describes how dub has a temporality all of its own. The genre, she writes, "echoes the past, reflects the present, and anticipates the future in its very production." Across Tikiman Vol. 1, these tracks also seem to reinvent and echo time past, present and future, almost as if they can escape time altogether. Like the way only the best dub can, these are patient and generous loops where even the slightest change of detail feels like a whole new world is opening itself up.
Tracklist01. Bedroom In My Bag
02. Little Way
03. Keep Safe
04. Bright One
05. The Weather Man
06. In Fortis
07. Ten To One
08. In Door
09. Three And A Half