'The street is not the most beautiful venue, but it’s real'

At a recent concert in New Delhi, musician Dub FX and his accomplice and fiancé Flower Fairy didn’t just perform on stage. They exploded. Their voices and experimental effects were unleashed into the full moon night like unstoppable, dazzling fireworks.

Potent, packed with shocking freshness, they held eardrums and feet captive to a beatbox-hiphop tornado till it all culminated in crashing, joyful applause. Even if it’s not music everyone can understand, it’s certainly something everyone can enjoy.

Aussie Benjamin Stanford has dabbled in different genres of music — reggae, jazz, hip hop, heavy metal — since he was 14. But the first step to developing the ‘Dub FX sound’ happened when he stuck a microphone in close proximity to his guitar pedal and fiddled with effects. To this he added ‘live looping’.

“I experimented with various effects: reverb, delays, EQ, compression etc over my vocals and this opened up a world of soundscapes. I’d record a sound and then loop it,” he explains. And beatboxing, or producing vocal percussion using one’s mouth, tongue and voice, is but a component of the Dub FX sound.
However, the literal journey for this musician  began about five years ago in Tuscany when he visited Italy to see his mom. “I wanted to make some money and I didn’t want to work in a café or a pub,” he says.

Instead he stood on the road and sang. In a single day he made 200 euros.  “That was more money than I had ever made in any other job,” he says excitedly. But it was later, on a street in England that young Shoshana Sadia (Flower Fairy) saw him perform. And it was the beginning of experimental eccentricities. “If I hear a police van zip by, I’ll imitate that sound, record it and then loop it. Or sometimes if I hear a crazy drunk person say something, I do the same and create music around it,” he says. “Or even a dog barking,” chips in Flower Fairy.

For close to five years now the couple has been living on the road. “We live in a van, go from city to city performing on the streets,” he says. Among the recorded offerings of Dub FX are a street album (comprising of street performances in various cities), a studio album and a Dub FX and Flower Fairy album.  “Flower fairy used to be a school teacher. So we’ve actually remixed and worked on rhymes such as Row row row your boat and Gingerbread man,”says Dub FX.

Asked what their ‘set’ will include in the Bangalore concert, they say: “We don’t ever plan anything, you know. We ‘vibe’ off the audience. We improvise a lot using melodies we already know,” says Dub FX, while Fairy nods repeatedly in agreement.

Dub FX admits that there has been feedback where people have found their recorded album to be different or not the same as their live performances. But it’s in live, right-before-one’s-eyes performances in which lies the duo’s strength lies, he explains.

And while they’ve performed in “forests, deserts and all over,” Dub FX says that the streets are still his favourite venue. “The whole sound was developed on the streets,” he emphasises. “It may not be the most beautiful venue, but it’s the most real,” signs off Flower Fairy.

Dub FX and Sarangi maestro Sabir Khan will perform in the city today as part of Dewar’s innovative movement called ‘The Dewarists’ which aims to promote unique talent