LOCK, STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS

Across their collaborative album Enter The Sound, Dub Pistols founder Barry Ashworth and Freestylers linchpin Aston Harvey prove that relentless hunger can outlive rave culture’s shifting tides.

- INDRAN PARAMASIVAM

Question:

How do you continue to stay dangerous after being at it for so long?

Barry Ashworth:

As I get older, I just want to kill people with love. That's how I'm dangerous now.

Like the music he's been making for the better part of 30 years, Barry Ashworth's words hit me square in the chest.

For all the sweat-slicked velocity, chest-quaking low end, and rave-born swagger associated with the culture from which Dub Pistols and Freestylers emerged, there has always been something deeply human beating beneath. Entire generations of revellers, crate-diggers, sound system obsessives, and nocturnal animals have gathered beneath its frequencies not merely for release, but for communion. Few artists understand that better than Ashworth and Aston Harvey, whose collaborative album Enter The Sound channels decades of exploding speakers and bar-raising musical telepathy into one gloriously unbound body of work.

Seated in separate locations on the other side of a Zoom call, the pair spend much of our conversation chuckling at each other's responses and goading one another with the ease of old co-conspirators relishing the opportunity to riff and elucidate. The warmth is palpable. So too is the enduring verve that powers Enter The Sound, a sprawling, full-bodied collision of ska, jungle, breakbeat, reggae, hip-hop, and rave euphoria that's as much a newly lit dance beacon as it is a testament to stirring friendship.

THE RIGHT WAY