Christoph El Truento.
Christopher Martin James, better known as Christoph El Truento, was introduced to Jamaican dub music as a child during the final years of the 20th century. Thinking back to his upbringing, he remembers finding a copy of Augustus Pablo and King Tubby’s King Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptown album in one of his older brothers’ record collections. At the time, Truento spent evenings flipping through the radio dial to see what he could find on the airwaves in 1990s Auckland. In comparison, the slinky sounds he heard on that record – equal parts spaced-out and low-slung – were an early revelation.
Over the next two decades, the longstanding Auckland-based DJ, beatmaker, and producer made his way into his home country’s hip-hop, beats, and modern jazz scenes in a supporting role before beginning to release his own fascinating solo albums in the early 2010s through European and Antipodean record labels such as OnGravity Records, Nutriot Recordings and Cosmic Compositions.
becoming a producer and DJ became inevitable.
“I had to go through the hip-hop world to become interested enough to make a filing system in my head of who’s who in other genres,” he explains. “I went down the route of figuring out what songs they were sampling and getting into different styles of music from there.”
Truento, born in 1989, grew up surrounded by music from a young age. Raised by a father who loved acoustic folk and a mother who encouraged creativity, he also benefitted from the familial influence of siblings who loved hip-hop, electro, dub, and reggae so much that they purchased drum machines, samplers, turntables, and mixers and started making music. After one of his older brothers gave him a copy of the PlayStation Music 2000 video game to learn how to make beats, becoming a producer and DJ became inevitable.
In the late 2010s, Truento began spending more time listening to music with one of his older brothers. The experience compelled him to revisit the Jamaican dub music his siblings introduced him to as a child. This time, having spent years recording and producing music in DIY home studio settings, he found dub production techniques and the stories surrounding them fascinating.
In particular, Truento was drawn towards the processes underpinning the late Jamaican producer and artist Lee “Scratch” Perry’s vividly psychedelic experimentation. “When you look at the photos of him and some of the rare footage, his studio was a lot more barebones,” enthuses Truento. “What he was doing seemed more approachable, in the sense that it was rooted in making do with what you’ve got.”
Christoph El Truento - Peace Maker Dub (2019/2023)
On the 25 January 2019, the Cosmic Compositions label released Truento’s first full-length dub album, Peace Maker Dub, as a digital download on Bandcamp. “I’d been trying to do it before then, but that was the first time that I felt like I’d made a dub record I was happy with,” he says. Over a cycle of tracks that displayed the depth of his knowledge of dub production techniques and the genre, Truento blended laptop-based production with recordings made on tape decks, broken-down amps and microphones, and other hybrid analogue-meets-digital techniques. “I used a reel-to-reel while recording the horn parts to give it that loud-hitting tape feel before digitising it.”
Opening with the watery, simple-living sounds of ‘Fishermans Dub’, Peace Maker Dub gently boils up like a slow-cooked stew for the soul. Across its running time, Truento’s warmhearted riddims mingle with playful guitar solos, ghostly organ sounds, xylophones, folkloric percussion, tripped-out sound effects, animal noises, and rootsy vocals that feel like they’ve been transmitted from somewhere between waking life and the depths of sleep.
Christoph El Truento - Peace Maker Dub (2024)
Before Peace Maker Dub, James mainly relied on his computer-based production skills to make music, plus the odd live part recorded by friends. This time around, he moved closer to the realm of full session recordings with a cast of collaborators, including his young son, his brother Eagle Master Selecto on guitar, and the New Zealand musicians JY Lee, Julien Dyne, Borrowed CS, Lord Echo, and Brent Overlord. “It was all people I would have been recording with them for other projects anyway,” he says. “I would have just asked them, ‘Can you record this for this?’”
Four years later, Truento contributed to Auckland broadcaster, DJ, producer, and record label owner Jim Pinckney, aka Stinky Jim’s Social Awareness EP. A collection of remixes of songs from Pinckney’s Spacial Awareness album, Social Awareness was the inaugural release from the dub and reggae-loving Waikato label Haymaker Records. “Dave, who runs Haymaker, is actually a farmer,” Truento explains. “He just loves dub and reggae music, buys records, and is so passionate about it that he just wants to contribute by putting out records. He’s a one-of-a-kind guy.”
After Truento DJed at the Social Awareness release party, Haymaker Records founder David Jefferis approached him with an idea. “He asked me if I was interested in putting Peace Maker Dub out on high-quality, well-packaged vinyl through his label,” Truento remembers. When they met up to discuss it further, he made a counterproposal. “I said, ‘Would you be interested in a package deal because I’ve got a new record ready to go,’” Truento continues. That new record was Dubs From The Neighbourhood, Truento’s second full-length dub album.
Christoph El Truento - Dubs From The Neighbourhood (2024)
Released within a month of each other, the vinyl LP editions of Peace Maker Dub and Dubs From The Neighbourhood quickly reached beyond New Zealand’s borders, securing Truento support from crucial UK, Japanese and online record stores and tastemakers such as Lion Vibes, Dubwise Vinyl, Dubstore, Colleen “Cosmo” Murphy, Kevin Martin aka The Bug, and Steve Barker. “I’m finding my music has quite a reach with people quite a bit older than me, and I’m stoked about that,” he says. “I’m not the type to keep a huge eye on what the algorithm is doing or the stats of my music plays, but as long as I can keep a foot in the vinyl scene, the digital stuff can bubble away in the background.”
Since it was first released on vinyl in June 2024, Dubs From The Neighbourhood has been repressed three times in three different colour variants designed by the Australian multidisciplinary artist Asher McShane, who also illustrates gig posters for Truento. Several weeks after its first release, Rolling Stone AU/NZ named Dubs From The Neighbourhood one of the best New Zealand albums of the first half of 2024. At the end of November, Auckland’s Flying Out store named the album #1 on its top 50 albums of 2024 list. Further accolades are sure to follow.
When he was recording and producing Dubs From The Neighbourhood, Truento found himself listening to more ska and early rocksteady, in particular, the sadly short-lived singer Keith “Slim” Smith, who has been long regarded as one of the finest singers to emerge from Jamaica in the 1960s, and his fellow countryman, the era-spanning producer Phil Pratt. “He has a haunting sound that I admire,” says Truento.
Keith “Slim” Smith’s influence is abundant on ‘Performer Dub’, which features the yearning tones of Māori soul vocalist Mara TK. “I think he was almost playing a rocksteady character on that song,” Truento explains. “It definitely fits into the relationship dispute topic, which is a common thread in that style of music.” Another standout on the album is ‘Pep The Conqueror’. Having previously contributed an innocent singalong vocal to ‘Pep’s Chant’ on Peace Maker Dub, ‘Pep The Conqueror’ sees Truento’s son returning to the microphone for a series of dreamlike te reo Māori vocal refrains. Truento: “The tone of a kid’s voice on reggae just cuts through differently, I think.”
From a New Zealand perspective, Dubs From The Neighbourhood feels like a reference to the old-school South Auckland hip-hop duo Sisters Underground’s breezy chart hit, ‘In The Neighbourhood’ (1994). “That definitely popped into my mind as soon as I came up with the title,” Truento says. “I liked that as a reference because I wanted to localise it. I’m inspired by Jamaican music, but I’m also always trying to make it feel like my surroundings at the same time.”
Simply put, it’s a masterpiece that deserves to be heard by young and old, far and wide.
Along a similar logic, the word neighbourhood feels like another way of saying community, which is fitting as Truento describes the musicians and vocalists he worked with on the album – many of whom featured on Peace Maker Dub – as a “tight-knit group of people I have good working relationships with.” From his perspective, it makes for a better timestamp when you work with an honest representation of your circle of friends. “I think when I look back through the credits, it will be more meaningful this way.”
Building on the playfulness, naivety, and innocence of Peace Maker Dub, Dubs From The Neighbourhood is the work of a studiously well-listened and practised producer who has managed not just to recapture the wide-eyed optimism of hearing dub for the first time as an eight-year-old but successfully balance those feelings with the weight of adult life. Simply put, it’s a masterpiece that deserves to be heard by young and old, far and wide. “I’m always trying to approach music from that childlike place,” Truento says. “I was making it during a time of grief after one of my brothers passed away. Dub and reggae can take sadness and give it a happy undertone. When you mix the two, it can get quite psychedelic.”
Pausing briefly, Truento takes a moment to reorient his thoughts before continuing. “It’s not like my experiences come anywhere near the degree of poverty or roughness that was going on in Jamaica during the 1970s, but reggae turned a rough situation into something more uplifting and joyous. Even just the way the melodies carried themselves had quite a positive or hopeful outlook. All I ever hoped was to accomplish my version of that feeling.”
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