- Mournful dub and experimental tracks inspired by Greek laïkó.
- Speaking to The Wire in February, Jay Glass Dubs positioned his work on a "counterfactual" timeline—in other words, a what-if scenario in which you might pose questions like, "What would dub be if King Tubby had Ableton?" On his latest EP, Jay Glass Dubs, AKA Dimitris Papadatos, turns his attention to Greek popular music. Plegnic's five tracks, inspired by a genre called laïkó, obscure the source material's plucky, sentimental registers. Instead, the music here is often mournful or agitated. There are, however, bits of laïkó that sometimes stick out at odd angles, as on the excellent "Mouthless Dub," where the bouzouki, a lute-like instrument, trills dramatically amid a soupy mist.
"Plegnic" is an obsolete term for a hammer-like blow. It nods to Papadatos's method of refreshing old-fashioned music, but sometimes the results, as well as being muddled, fail to connect the past and the present convincingly. "Dry Dub" is overloaded with stiff percussive tics and random Foley-esque effects, making the track's core idea hard to discern. "Fearless Dub"'s unsteady 3/4 beat sometimes churns into recursive loops, especially in the midsection. The vocalist Yorgia Karidi is a key presence on the EP's other two tracks. She surfaces amid "Umbro Dub"'s slo-mo howls of stadium airhorns and choral ghosts. "Temple Dub" introduces rave fragments into another haunted soundscape, through which Karidi's vocals are given even more space to float. When Papadatos turns to these smoky atmospheres, Plegnic strikes true.
Tracklist01. Temple Dub
02. Umbro Dub
03. Mouthless Dub
04. Dry Dub
05. Fearless Dub