Dub and the version

Lee "Scratch" Perry's studio behind his home at Washington Gardens, Kingston, built in 1973 and running until its destruction by fire in 1979. Working with modest four-track equipment, Perry produced a sound nobody has convincingly reproduced — layered, saturated, drenched in echo and unexpected noise — on records for Max Romeo, Junior Murvin, the Congos and The Heptones, and on his own productions. The Black Ark years are the strongest argument that the studio itself, and not only the players, is an instrument in Jamaican music.

"Three Piece Suit" is Trinity's deejay record that helped anchor the Three Piece Suit rhythm family; Althea & Donna's answer-style "Uptown Top Ranking" turned that same musical setting into a global reggae pop memory.

The Stalag riddim begins as "Stalag 17", an instrumental written and played by Ansell Collins and released on Winston Riley's Techniques label in 1973. It went on to become one of the most heavily versioned rhythms in Jamaican music, and the bed for the single most sampled record dancehall has produced: Sister Nancy's "Bam Bam" (1982) is voiced over Stalag, not over any rhythm of its own. Tenor Saw's "Ring the Alarm" (1985) is the other cornerstone cut. Riley was shot in Kingston and died in 2012; the rhythm he issued in 1973 is still being voiced and sampled worldwide.

"I'm Still in Love with You Boy" by Marcia Aitken is a late-1970s female-voiced answer/version in the Alton Ellis song family, a compact example of Jamaican versioning across gendered perspectives and eras.

"I'm Still in Love," Alton Ellis's 1967 rocksteady ballad, became one of Jamaican music's most durable rhythms - reworked, versioned and sampled across reggae and dancehall for decades, including well-known dancehall re-cuts that introduced the melody to entirely new generations of listeners.

A one-off acetate cut for a single sound system — originally a test pressing, then the core weapon of clash culture. A sound commissions an artist to voice a custom version of a known tune naming that sound, and plays it as an exclusive nobody else can answer. The dubplate turns a record into a possession, and its economy sustains a whole layer of the business.

The 1985 riddim, built by Wayne Smith and Noel Davey on a Casiotone preset at King Jammy's and voiced by Smith as "Under Mi Sleng Teng", that ended the era of the live band as the default of Jamaican music. Cheap, fully electronic and instantly copyable, it triggered the digital turn: hundreds of versions followed within a few years, production costs collapsed, and dancehall's tempo, texture and economics were remade around it. Nothing else in the archive divides a before from an after so cleanly.

The remix before the word existed: Jamaican engineers of the early 1970s — King Tubby foremost, with Lee Perry, Errol Thompson and their successors — stripped the vocal from a rhythm and rebuilt what remained live at the desk, drums and bass forward, fragments of voice and horns drenched in reverb and delay. It began as B-side economics and became a form in its own right, and its fingerprints are on remix culture, hip hop instrumentals, jungle, dubstep and every music that treats the studio as an instrument.

The riddim behind Alton Ellis's 1967 Studio One rocksteady side "I'm Still in Love With You", recut a decade later at Joe Gibbs's studio and turned into one of Jamaica's most productive version chains: Marcia Aitken's 1977 answer version, Trinity's toast "Three Piece Suit", and Althea & Donna's "Uptown Top Ranking", which reached number one in Britain in February 1978. A textbook case of one rhythm track carrying several hit records across a decade.

Osbourne Ruddock (1941-1989), the Waterhouse electronics engineer who invented dub. He built and repaired amplifiers, ran his own Hometown Hi-Fi sound, and began cutting versions with parts dropping in and out, drenched in reverb and delay worked live at the controls — first as exclusive plates for his own dances, then as a form in its own right. He trained Scientist, Prince Jammy and others, and his approach to the mixing desk as an instrument reshaped record production worldwide. He was shot dead outside his home in 1989.

Althea & Donna's 1977 single — two Kingston teenagers over the "I'm Still in Love" rhythm, answering Trinity's "Three Piece Suit" — which reached number one in the UK in early 1978. A patois record about dressing well and taking no advice topping the British chart was without precedent, and it has kept its charm intact for nearly fifty years.

Rainford Hugh Perry (1936-2021), producer, singer and studio visionary — the most idiosyncratic figure in Jamaican music. He came up through Coxsone's Studio One and Joe Gibbs before going out on his own as Upsetter, producing The Wailers' hardest early work and the Upsetters' instrumentals. From 1973 he built the Black Ark behind his house and made records there — for Max Romeo, Junior Murvin, The Congos and The Heptones — whose layered, echo-drenched sound has never been convincingly copied. He burned the studio down in 1979 and spent the following decades working abroad as reggae's most celebrated eccentric.

In Jamaica the rhythm track, not the finished song, is the durable unit of creativity.

In the studios of 1970s Kingston, engineers learned to dismantle a finished song and rebuild it as something stranger, launching the version, the remix and the idea of the producer as author.

By the mid-1970s, stripping a reggae master down to drum, bass and echo had stopped being a B-side trick and become an album statement in its own right.

How a Waterhouse engineer turned mixing into an instrument and previewed the remix age.