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Dr. Israel is a dub artist from Brooklyn/New York City. For him, dub music -- originally rooted in 1960s Jamaican reggae culture -- is the starting point to explore a universe of sounds, including hardcore punk, rock, hip-hop, ambient, electronics, reggae, drum and bass. A global melting pot of a wild variety of musical styles. Douglas Bennett, aka Dr. Israel (Jamaicans gave him his artist name when he lived for a while in a Niyabinghi community and became a Rastafari) discovered what he calls "non-traditional" reggae while playing guitar in punk rock bands in his native Philadelphia. His inspirations and influences include punk/reggae hybridists Bad Brains and ragga/hip-hop pioneer Boogie Down Productions as well as 1980s reggae stars like Sly & Robbie and Black Uhuru. In the early 1990s, he began experimenting with sampling keyboards and beats. A few years later he and others like DJ Spooky and Skiz "Spectre" Fernando earned international renown for creating "illbient", a sound that mixed jungle and hip-hop beats with otherworldly dub, ambient and avant-garde classical tones. Dr. Israel has released several projects, including Black Rose Leberation, Inna City Pressure (1998), Patterns of War (2005), Love In The Time Of Violence, and has worked with Bill Laswell (in supergroup Methods of Defiance), Lee "Scratch" Perry, The Last Poets, Rancid, Santigold, Sepultura, Laurie Anderson, Bernie Worrell, Easy Star Allstars, Alpha & Omega, and also with the rapper and Wu-Tang Clan affiliate, Killah Priest. "The one thing that I'm most thankful for is that I've been able to touch elbows with my heroes," he says. "I don't want to do traditional reggae because there are a lot of people already doing that. I don't think I could ever create a straight-ahead pop track. I'm not the kind of person who's big on writing love songs, but I am able to create a song partly based on the 1982 collaboration between punk icons the Clash and beat poet Allen Ginsberg." "I create and produce music a bit like Bruce Lee. He came from the traditional Kung Fu and merged/combined for his martial arts discipline Tae-kwon-do, and other traditional martial arts to an effective system. That's the basic idea of combining styles." Features DJ Olive remix.
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