The last decade or so of Bill Callahan’s music has been a steady process of refinement, stripping away extraneous words and instrumentation and leaving only what’s essential. While this trend doesn’t run in a straight line—2006’s Neil Hagerty-produced Woke on a Whaleheart has a comparatively heavy production touch—he’s mostly done away with reverb, distortion, and processing; his music tends to consist of basic instrumentation presented without adornment, reflecting a confidence that the songs are strong enough to do the work. Last year’s Dream River was no exception, so it was on one hand a surprise that an advance track prior to the record’s release was a "dub" version of "Javelin Unlanding" called "Expanding Dub". Dub essentially involves using mixing and effects as a form of expression; the song matters far less than what’s done to it, which initially seemed an odd way to hear Callahan’s spare music. More surprising still was word that Callahan and his mixer Brian Beattie would extend the idea to the entirety of Dream River, creating a dub version of the record, a la Mad Professor’s re-working of Massive Attack’s second album, Protection.
Initial surprise aside, Callahan’s interest in the form makes sense. Classic Jamaican dub from 1970s and 80s is music of great focus and discipline; mixers like King Tubby, Lee "Scratch" Perry, and Scientist often created instrument dubs for the B-sides of 7" singles in a single take, re-working the track and adding effects live while the tape of the original song rolled. So once everything was in place, dubbing a four-minute single would take four minutes, with all of the echo, drop-outs, flanging, and various other effects added in real-time. This approach stands in sharp contrast to today’s standard approach to remixing, which uses non-linear digital editing to allow for endless copying, pasting, looping, and processing. A classic dub doesn’t involve any extending of specific sections—the bones of the song are set and the mixer’s job is to shine light on different elements, foregrounding, backgrounding, and transforming, warping time without changing it. Given that, creating dubs using the tools at hand in Jamaica in the 1970s—often four-track tape machines—required a lot of practice and a tremendous amount of discipline. And the best dub can also feel like a celebration of the individual instrument, as parts fall away and you zoom in on the texture created by a simple bassline.
All that squares with Callahan’s approach to sound, and, however it was actually made, Have Fun With God feels like a live, real-time dub. The tape rolls, and the essential arc of each song is unchanged. In addition to the sense of spontaneity, the arrangements of this record lend themselves well to the treatment. Hand drums, flute, and clean guitar lines all lend sound rich in isolation, and light touches of echo, and Callahan’s voice, so front-and-center on his recordings, works well when single words or even syllables are called out and given light touches of effects. It’s also pleasingly disorienting to hear the music of this word-focused artist transformed in such a way that the words don’t really matter—here they mostly become sounds. With a couple of exceptions, where the tracks playfully focus on a key moment in a song (like the call-out of "beer" in the opening "Thank Dub"), there’s no attempt to pay the lyrics any particular attention or amplify the song’s "meaning." The approach also underscores the fact that there are some nicely tricky little rhythms pulsing under these mid-tempo songs.
So at its best, Have Fun With God works well as an experiment and as a listening puzzle to work through. If you know Dream River well—and it’s hard to imagine anyone else being interested in this record—you’ll hear new things in it after giving this record a couple of spins. It also seems safe to say that, despite its charms and left-field nature, Have Fun With God will be a minor entry in the Callahan catalogue, remembered about as well as his low-key 2010 live album Rough Travel for a Rare Thing, which is not to say I’m not glad both exist.
