Two Records, One Idea — Leftism and Heart of the Congos
Upstream from London to Kingston, and the order we hear things in
By Rafi Mercer
The last voice on Leftism belongs to a poet. Lemn Sissay, speaking over a rhythm that has spent the best part of seventy minutes refusing to sit still. Then it ends, and there's the small, uncertain silence you get between records, when the room hasn't decided yet what it's for.
Heart of the Congos went into that silence. It sounded better than it had any right to, as if the first record had spent the previous hour preparing the ground.
That's worth sitting with, because we hardly ever talk about it. We talk about records as fixed objects, things with a score and a place on a list. But nobody hears a record in a vacuum. You hear it after something. The last hour is still in your ears, setting the levels and deciding what you'll notice. Order is an instrument, and most of us play it without knowing.
These two records were made eighteen years and an ocean apart. One was cut on four tracks in a back-yard studio in Washington Gardens, Kingston. The other was made at Rollover Studios in London, with everything the mid-nineties could offer. On paper they have nothing to say to each other. In practice they share a bloodline, and you only hear it properly if you go against the current.
London first, because that's where I started.
Leftism came out in January 1995 and was filed under progressive house, a label that hasn't aged well. The record took three years to arrive. Its first piece, "Release the Pressure", had come out in 1992 on the duo's own Hard Hands label, with the Jamaican singer Earl Sixteen on vocals. By the time it opened the album, Neil Barnes and Paul Daley had slowed it down. It builds now. It holds back. Half the track is tension, and the tension is dub: bass you feel in the floor before you hear it, space left empty on purpose, echo doing the work a melody would do anywhere else.
Daley has said dub first reached him through punk gigs in the mid-seventies and John Peel's late-night shows, and that Jamaican music shaped how the album was made. You can hear it everywhere once you know to listen. In Danny Red on "Inspection (Check One)". In the fact that Leftfield built their own sound system to play the music out, as if they understood that this was bass meant to be pushed through a room rather than through headphones. The record lost the Mercury that year to Portishead's Dummy, which tells you something about Britain in 1995. Two of its best records were quietly working out what to do with Jamaican space.
And it moves. "Afro-Left" with its drums and Djum Djum's voice. "Song of Life" lifting slowly towards the light. "Melt" doing almost nothing, beautifully. It's an engineered record, clean and enormous, with a low end that has weight and direction. It sits on your chest. It leans forward. For seventy minutes it teaches you, without saying so, to listen to what's underneath and to what's been left out.
Then Kingston.
Cedric Myton and Roydel Johnson came to Lee Perry as a duo, a falsetto and a tenor. Johnson had been at school with Perry, and the connection eventually brought them to the Black Ark. Perry heard what was missing and added Watty Burnett, a baritone, so that three voices could stack into the old Jamaican vocal-group shape. Behind them he put a band that reads like a roll of honour: Boris Gardiner on bass, Ernest Ranglin on guitar, Sly Dunbar among the drummers. Behind those, backing voices including Gregory Isaacs, the Meditations, and two of the Heptones.
All of it went down on four tracks, and four tracks force decisions. Things bleed into each other. Voices share space with hand percussion and hiss. Perry's phasing makes whole passages seem to breathe in and out. Coming straight from a polished 1995 production, the first thing you notice is the murk, and then you realise the murk isn't a fault. It's weather. The sound has a humidity to it, a closeness, the feeling of a small room in a hot city with the door left open.
And then the voices. On Leftism, singers are guests. They arrive, deliver something, and leave the machines to carry on. On Heart of the Congos the three voices are the architecture. Myton's falsetto floats above everything, Johnson holds the middle, and Burnett sits underneath like a foundation stone. After an hour of bass as the body of the music, here is a record where the body is human. The harmonies don't so much play as arrive, warm and slightly unsteady, the way people sound when they're singing about things they believe.
It came close to not being heard at all. Island, which had Perry under contract, turned it down. Chris Blackwell's reasons have never quite satisfied anyone. Perry released it himself on his own Black Art label in small numbers, and it took nearly two decades for Blood and Fire to reissue it properly and give it the hearing it deserved. The Black Ark didn't survive long enough to see that. Perry always maintained he burned it down himself. The record now sits on lists of the decade's best. For most of its first twenty years it was a rumour passed between collectors.
So why does the second record sound better for following the first?
Partly it's tempo. Leftism runs on propulsion, and when it stops your body is still leaning forward. The roots sway of "Fisherman" catches you mid-lean and lets you settle back. It's an exhale, and an exhale only feels like relief after you've been holding your breath.
But mostly I think it's tuning. Leftism spends seventy minutes training your ear for low end, for the gap, for echo as structure. It teaches you dub without ever announcing it. So when Perry's bass line arrives, you're already listening for it. When the reverb trails off a word and leaves it hanging, you hear that as intent rather than accident. You've been given the grammar, and now you're reading the original text.
There's a strange pleasure in running chronology backwards like this. It's like learning a word and only later meeting its root, or following a river upstream until you find where it rises. Leftfield didn't need to sample the Congos to owe them something. The debt runs through dub as a whole, through the Black Ark and King Tubby's console, through the sound systems that crossed to London and through the punk venues and late-night radio where two young men first heard that low end and never shook it off.
This is the selector's art, and it's what the best listening bars understand. The person behind the counter isn't just choosing good records. They're choosing what each record will be heard after. A good room plays order the way a band plays dynamics, and a good evening is built from these quiet connections, one record making a case for the next.
Leftism ends with a poet. Heart of the Congos begins with a fisherman. Between them there's a few seconds of silence, the kind you'd normally ignore, and that's where the eighteen years and the ocean collapse into nothing. London hands the room back to Kingston. The bass goes on.
Is Heart of the Congos a dub album?
Not strictly. It's a roots reggae vocal album built around three-part harmony. But Lee Perry produced it at the height of his Black Ark period, and his production is steeped in dub technique: phasing, echo, space, and a dense, humid mix. Later reissues added dub versions and alternate mixes that make the connection even clearer.
Why pair Leftism with Heart of the Congos?
Leftism is an electronic record shaped deeply by dub reggae, with Jamaican vocalists and a sound-system attitude to bass. Hearing it first tunes your ear to low end and open space, so the Congos' record lands as the source of something you've already been listening to. Played in that order, each makes the other clearer.
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