"Hello Michelle. Would you like to see me?" asks Neal Fraser, better known as Mad Professor, the dub king and Lee "Scratch" Perry disciple. Without waiting for a response, he flicks on his Skype video, giving me an extreme close-up view of his forehead. Reggae floats through the speakers from his office in London, his adopted city since the age of 13. Fraser has just returned from a tour that brought him to Sydney, Tokyo, and New York—where he played at the Dub Champions festival with Perry, and at Francois K's long-running Deep Space club night. As an undisputed master of sound engineering, Fraser is widely renowned for bringing dub music to the digital age. But his latest LP, Dubbing With Anansi, which drops February 2 on his label Ariwa Sounds, takes a long look back in history; the album is inspired by a half man, half spider African folk hero named Anansi.Fraser jumps straight into impromptu story time."When Anasi was captured in Africa," he begins in his lilting Caribbean accent, "him and his family were put in chains and taken into the waiting cell where they kept the slaves until the ships came in. The next day, the slave master come to take them out. When he opened the cells, he found no Anansi nor his family, but instead some spiders running around the place." Fraser pauses and smiles. "That shows you the power of Anansi."The legends of Anansi are some of the few folk stories that survived the brutal Atlantic slave crossing, as slaves defied orders not to speak in their native tongues to swap stories about his cunning exploits. Hence, Fraser sees Anansi as a symbol of black resilience, intelligence, and liberation. "Some people see Anansi as a story you tell children. Some people see him as a bit of a joke—a fairy tale. But Anansi has a real, political, and mythical position in history," he says.Today, Anansi stories can still be heard around the world, from Jamaica to New Orleans and Brazil. Fraser remembers hearing them in kindergarten back in Guyana, where he lived until his family moved to London when he was 13. The idea to center his album on the folk hero came to him out of the blue. "It just occurred to me like, hey man, this thing really needs to be touched upon. So I touched upon it. The morals to the story could apply to you whether you're on a slave plantation in the 1800s, or in 2016 London or New York City."Fittingly, Dubbing With Anansi opens with the sounds of seagulls and the ocean, before launching into "Atlantic Crossing," one of many tracks whose titles directly reference Anansi and the slave trade. Others include "Rebel Gathering," "Middle Passage," and "Anansi Spell." With melodies and rhythms drawn from across West Africa and the Caribbean, the dubby, percussive album clearly reflects the cultures that have influenced it.Next month, Fraser will perform several shows in Switzerland and France with his mentor Lee "Scratch" Perry—who he says is a "mythical figure, one of the Anansis of our time. You can't pin him down." Then, the ever-prolific producer will start working on his next album, which he says will be based on the "on-the-ground situation" with Australia's Aborigines. "I've recorded some Aborigine chants and didgeridoos in a little village outside Byron Bay on the West Coast. We're in the studio now cooking that up." He pitches forward towards the camera, so that all I can see once again is the side of his eye and forehead—which somehow makes his next declaration all the more formidable. "Whatever comes up, I'm ready."Michelle Lhooq is the Features Editor of THUMP - @MichelleLhooq
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