The Scientist

One of dub’s foremost practitioners during the 1980s, Scientist stood out on the Jamaican music landscape through his expansive studio methods, his inventive approach to the mixing console, and the flamboyant titles and imagery that adorned his albums. Those releases regularly cast his technical prowess as a weapon against monsters, legendary adversaries, and figures drawn from video games. Born Overton Brown in Kingston on April 18, 1960, the teenager was only sixteen when producer and performer Errol “Don” Mais recognized and nurtured his prodigious talent for dub.

Basic electronics training came from his father, a television repairman, giving Brown an edge with the city’s roving DJ crews whose sound systems frequently needed repairs. A friend urged him to approach the renowned producer and mixer King Tubby—not for a remix session, but simply to obtain transformers for self-built amplifiers. Before long Brown joined Tubby’s staff, servicing transformers and television sets. An animated discussion about record mixing prompted Tubby to dare the youngster to try his hand at a remix; flush with youthful confidence, Brown accepted, and the encounter blossomed into a sustained apprenticeship in experimental dub. While working at Tubby’s he forged his singular style—playful, heavily psychedelic, punctuated by sudden bursts of echo and feedback—that drew the ear of Don Mais during a studio visit. Under Mais’s production oversight, the eighteen-year-old Scientist recorded a series of potent dub tracks for the Roots Tradition label.

By the close of the 1970s he had departed Tubby’s operation to serve as chief engineer at Channel One Studios, where, in tandem with Henry “Junjo” Lawes, he produced several commercially successful dub albums. In 1982 he moved on to Tuff Gong. Three years later Scientist relocated to Silver Springs, Maryland, where he worked as a recording engineer, designed custom electronics, and persisted in creating and issuing fresh dub material. In the new century he launched a determined effort to assert his rights as a recording artist and secure royalty payments, filing suit against Greensleeves Records for unauthorized licensing and reissues of his catalog and taking the makers of the video game Grand Theft Auto to court for employing his tracks as background music without permission. These legal pursuits did not halt new creative work; in 2017 he issued the albums Untouchable and Allied Dub Selection.