Strategy: The Wet Room
Community Library

'Twas a time when Paul Dickow was framing his Strategy music as “World House”; the Community Library co-founder's twentieth album, The Wet Room, suggests the slightly amended “World Dub” might be a better current fit. At times the forty-minute set plays like some modern-day homage to King Tubby, but, par for the Strategy course, the release, issued in digital and LP formats, resists such easy capture by branching out into multiple overheated zones.

Pitched as a sequel of sorts to 2015's Seeds of Paradise, The Wet Room picks up where the earlier one left off, the new collection as immersive as its predecessor and as starry-eyed. One of Dickow's own avowed aims was to create a thematically integrated set that would satisfy equally as a headphone experience and sound system-styled exercise. To that end, the album works as both chill-out material and body music, its hazy sound design capable of addling the senses and its infectious rhythms primed for movement. Perhaps climate change was on his mind as the material developed, given the generally sunblazed character of the project.

After a scene-setter that sees film-derived voice exchanges swimming in a thick, granular fog, “Deadly Rainbow” plunges the listener into a jungle of thudding bass drops and funky pulses, micro-traces of the “Amen Break” audible in the distance and fragments of melody flickering. While the hyper-charged swing of “Meanwhile Moon” revisits the rapturous vibe of Dickow's “World House” period, “Mysteries Inside the Dogmind” sounds as if he exhumed some lost Entain-era Vladislav Delay track and coupled it with Curtis Mayfield guitar fragments and noise detritus of various types. Dense, drifting soundscapes (“Numeros”) and abstract collages drenched in radio transmissions (the weather forecast-obsessed “Heat”) alternate with throbbing, club-ready expressions (“Freshmosphere,” a slow-funk workout sprinkled with traces of garage and drum'n'bass). Dickow's personal stamp is all over the material, though it's possible to draw connecting dots to others, Photek and Nightmares on Wax among them.

December 2023