ARIWA SOUNDS

Zinc Fence is a London based site and we make no apologies for giving the September slot to another London site, the home on the web of UK reggae label Ariwa Sounds at http://www.ariwa.com

Ariwa Records started life back in 1979 as a one man operation in the South London living room of Neil Fraser, AKA The Mad Professor. Over the last twenty years his Ariwa label has been a cornerstone of UK reggae and the Mad Professor has built up an impressive body of work, ranging from lovers rock to the wilder shores of dub, from Jamaican artists like Johnny Clarke to home grown talent like Pato Banton and Sandra Cross.

Unjustly neglected for too long, reggae music in the UK has probably never been in a healthier state than right now. While in the Seventies UK reggae was, justly or otherwise, seen as synonymous with lovers rock, the UK is now coming up with the broadest imaginable range of reggae music, from the raw ragga of Glamma Kid and the Squad One Crew to the conscious roots of Chukky Starr and Starky Banton to the contemporary lovers rock of Peter Hunningdale.

The Ariwa home page is straightforward and unpretentious, just a directory of the site's pages with no flashy, slow-to-download images that conceal a basic lack of content on so many sites. This emphasises that this is a working site from people who are working directly with the music. It's a work place.

The Lovers Rock page gets straight down to business with a track listing for Ariwa Lovers Rock Vol 1 due out in September, together with a short account of the lovers rock genre and a deserved complaint at the lack of respect for lovers rock.

The Ariwa Studios page is exactly that, a description of the studios, which have clearly moved on from the Thornton Heath living room of twenty years ago. Not just the sound equipment and the recording facilities are described but the size of the rooms and even the parking opportunities outside! The fact that the page is under construction serves to emphasise further that this is a working environment. If you know London you'll understand what I mean if I say that if most reggae sites on the web are Covent Garden, then Ariwa Sounds is Soho.

The Dub page gives, naturally, a short account of the genre and its practitioners, an account which few are better equipped to give than the Mad Professor. A feature of Ariwa's output has always been the Professor's enthusiasm for marrying sweet voiced lovers' vocals to heavy dubwise rhythms, in the process giving far greater prominence to female artistes than is often the case elsewhere. The Professor has always been willing to experiment, take risks, and break down musical boundaries.

Updates are clearly frequent here, unlike many sites where all the lights are on but there's no one actually at home. The News page gives an August update on new work from Aisha, Black Steel and other Ariwa regulars. The Live Dates page features a big festival in Belgium on 4th September headlined by the Mad Professor and Lee Perry, again emphasising that these are working people.

The Deaf Journalist page, as its title suggests, is something of a complaint, although not an individually named journalist with either a hearing or awareness deficit. It's directed rather at coverage of UK reggae generally, at the low level of reggae sales in the UK, and at the quality of the music being played on UK radio, which the writer feels is too guns n' violence obsessed. You will have already noticed that this is in stark contrast to the sunny optimism of my first paragraph. Well, that's healthy, and maybe a discussion on the UK reggae scene is overdue on the web.

The Artists page lists some of those artists who have recorded with Ariwa, veteran greats like U Roy and Lee Perry, established UK names like Chukki Starr and Starkey Banton, and names like Borra and Sushi who are entirely new to me.

If you've haven't listened to any UK reggae for a while then check it out, and there's no better place to start than this website.