Where: New Jersey
When: April 21-April 24, 2025
Reporter: Stephen Cooper
Photos & Videos: Stephen Cooper (Clips/Photos)
Media Editing : Teacher
Copyright: 2025 – Stephen Cooper
If you’re a record label situated in a bucolic, sleepy, and spectacularly beautiful small town and you’re looking to bring instant vibes, credibility, and recognizability in all of reggae’s subgenres—including dub—to your studio, it is a master stroke to fly in the legendary Jamaican sound engineer and dub pioneer, Hopeton Brown, known worldwide as “Scientist.”
That’s what Soul Selects Records did at the end of April by bringing Scientist to their studio—a bright and airy space surrounded by lush forest and green fields—to record. And record they did.
By the end of the week, studio owners Jon March and Chris Harford, as well as Harford’s daughter—Soul Selects’ label manager, Amanda—all had big smiles on their faces as well as 15 sizzling new rhythm tracks they can do whatever they want with in the future—including perhaps using them on another album to be released by the label’s exciting and emerging reggae-punk band, Blanc du Blanc; just last month Scientist and Blanc du Blanc released their first extremely well received collaboration, “Scientist Meets Blanc du Blanc: Before the Beginning”; the band’s sold-out album release party April 26—and Blanc du Blanc’s performance—was so smoking hot, so full of good vibes and inventive alien costumes, patrons were over-the-moon.
The possibilities of what Soul Selects Records can do with this new outpouring of creativity—shepherded in their studio by the living legend Scientist—are endless. Harford, who is also Blanc du Blanc’s bandleader, confided that he didn’t necessarily have any defined outcome in mind for this “precious” opportunity to work alongside Scientist in his studio; he just wanted to get as many of his close musician friends—including some of the members of Blanc du Blanc—to also get the chance to learn from a legend, a man as responsible for the development and success of dub as the also-legendary King Tubby who birthed the genre in Jamaica—and who gave Scientist his big break.
Thanks to Soul Selects Records I was a “fly on the wall” during these super-cool studio sessions. Like Soul Selects’ studio engineer Michael Cumming and the musicians working with Scientist—these included Chris Harford, David Butler, John Goetchius, Robert Mangano, Jon Thompson, Adam Flicker, Jon Shaw, Sim Cain, George Miller, and Andrew Weiss—I tried to soak in everything I was seeing and hearing to document it for the readers of Reggae-Vibes via the photos and video embedded in this article. Enjoy!