Reset in Dub

Over the course of a long career, Sonic Boom's unvarying desire to explore the beauty and power of repetition through hypnotic, sometimes abrasive sound has made him a legendary figure. Whether utilizing guitars and drug imagery as part of the influential group Spacemen 3, digging into electronic noise and avant-garde sounds with the Experimental Audio Research collective, or fronting his vintage synth-driven pop unit Spectrum, his devotion to his aural ideals earned him an impressive following in the late '80s and '90s. He turned his focus toward production and collaboration after that, working with important artists like Panda Bear and MGMT and underground artists like Cheval Sombre. In the late 2010s, he returned to making music, collaborating on an EP with No Joy in 2018 and two years later releasing the quintessentially hypnotic All Things Being Equal. In 2022, Sonic Boom teamed up with longtime collaborator Panda Bear for the joint album Reset. A holiday album with Dean & Britta, A Peace of Us, arrived in 2024, and in 2025 Sonic Boom teamed with Swiss duo Sinner DC for collaborative album Maps.

While attending art college, Rugby, England native Pete Kember teamed up with Jason Pierce to form Spacemen 3, recording a demo tape in 1986. After signing to Glass Records, the group recorded their debut LP, Sound of Confusion, for which Kember adopted the name Peter Gunn. By the time of their follow-up EP, Walkin' with Jesus, he had rechristened himself Sonic Boom, keeping the pseudonym for the duration of his career. In 1990, he issued an album under the Sonic Boom name, Spectrum; when Spacemen 3 broke up soon after, Kember recycled the Spectrum title as the name of his new band. Spectrum debuted with the full-length Soul Kiss (Glide Divine) in 1992, and released two more LPs (Highs, Lows & Heavenly Blows and Forever Alien) as the decade progressed. Spectrum also issued many singles and EPs, as well as collaborations with Silver Apples and Jessamine.

Sonic Boom was also the driving force behind the avant-noise Experimental Audio Research project, a loose configuration of musicians including My Bloody Valentine's Kevin Shields and Techno Animal's Kevin Martin, among others. That group released many records over the last half of the '90s, and resurfaced for one album, Worn to a Shadow, in the mid-2000s, a time when Kember was more likely to be guesting or producing someone else's music rather than making on his own.

During the 2000s, he worked with Füxa, the Warlocks, Magnétophone, Dean & Britta, Cheval Sombre, Sunray, and the Flowers from Hell, both as a performer and producer. His return from the fringes of the alternative scene occurred when MGMT hired him to produce their high-profile second album, Congratulations, in 2010. Afterwards, he continued working steadily, adding his hypnotic magic to records by TEEN, Cheval Sombre, Panda Bear, and Moon Duo, and collaborating on a heavily electronic 2018 EP with shoegaze revivalists No Joy.

A couple years before that, he had begun working on a set of instrumentals done on modular synths. Despite receiving assurance from his longtime friend Tim Gane (of Stereolab fame) that the songs were good enough to release, Kember shelved them. After a move to Portugal in 2018, he revisited the tracks and added vocals. This time he deemed it ready, and Carpark issued All Things Being Equal in 2020. The typically hypnotic and uniquely sunny album featured collaborations with Panda Bear and Britta Phillips. A collection of Kember's synth-heavy remixes of songs from the album -- plus two tracks that were released exclusively in Japan -- soon followed. Titled Almost Nothing Is Nearly Enough, the album was issued by Carpark in April of 2021.

In 2022, Sonic Boom and Panda Bear joined forces once again for Reset, their first official collaborative LP after more than a decade of working together. The sessions for Reset began during the early phases of the international COVID-19 lockdowns, and found the old friends pushing each other to new places creatively, Sonic Boom even singing on some tracks where he'd primarily suck to an instrumental role on previous collaborations. The album was released by Domino in August of 2022. With 2024's A Peace of Us, Kember joined forces with longtime associates Dean & Britta for a set of holiday-themed music. The next year, he teamed with Swiss electronic duo Sinner DC for the release of collaborative album Maps, a collection of music originally conceived in 2013 for live performance at the Festival La Bâtie in Switzerland. ~ Jason Ankeny & Tim Sendra

Already highly influential as a member of Animal Collective, Panda Bear has altered the course of indie rock even further with his work as a solo artist. His reverb-saturated vocal harmonies take notes from the Beach Boys, while his sample-based songwriting brings in techniques borrowed from hip-hop producers such as Madlib and Pete Rock, as well as atmospheric techno labels like Kompakt and Dial. His 2007 full-length Person Pitch helped reframe the use of samples in indie rock, and Panda Bear's synthesis of electronic production, emotionally vulnerable lyricism, and psychedelic spirit evolved on subsequent albums like 2019's Buoys, his 2022 collaboration with Sonic Boom, Reset, and the highly collaborative, live band feel of 2025's Sinister Grift.

Noah Lennox adopted the name Panda Bear in the late '90s, when he drew a picture of a panda on one of his first bedroom studio recordings. He grew up in Maryland and Pennsylvania, went to college at Boston University, and eventually found his way to New York City, where he met his future Animal Collective bandmates Avey Tare, Geologist, and Deakin. In addition to his work with Animal Collective, Jane, and Together, Lennox has released several solo albums. In 1999, while Lennox and Avey Tare were still in the earliest stages of what would grow to be known as Animal Collective, the first solo collection of Panda Bear material arrived on an obscure self-titled release on indie label Soccer Star. The electronica-pop recordings were miles away from the more spectral folk weirdness Lennox would explore over the next several years. Materializing in 2004, his more widely distributed second solo album, Young Prayer, was a murky, largely wordless free-folk album influenced by the death of his father. That year, Lennox moved to Lisbon, Portugal, where he met fashion designer Fernanda Pereira while on vacation; the two subsequently married and started a family.

Person Pitch, Lennox's third album and second on the Paw Tracks label, followed three years later. The album was a patchwork of repurposed samples and densely layered vocals, and not only met enormous popularity and critical acclaim, but went on to be incredibly influential on the entire indie spectrum. Lennox guested on recordings by Atlas Sound, Pantha du Prince, Taken by Trees, and Ducktails, and remixed the Notwist's song "Boneless." For his next solo album, Lennox made the decision to move away from samplers toward a more guitar-heavy sound. Working with producer Sonic Boom, Lennox released his fourth solo album, Tomboy, on Paw Tracks in 2011. He continued racking up guest appearances, collaborating with Zomby, Teengirl Fantasy, and Daft Punk, whose 2013 album Random Access Memories (containing the Panda Bear-featuring "Doin' It Right") won the 2014 Grammy for Album of the Year.

In October of 2014, Panda Bear released a new EP, Mr. Noah. The EP's title track also appeared on Lennox's fifth full-length, Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper, which arrived on Domino in early 2015. The colorful album again found Lennox collaborating with producer Sonic Boom. The full-length was followed by PBVSGR Remixes, an EP containing reworks by Pete Rock, Andy Stott, Container, and others, as well as Crosswords, another EP containing updated and unreleased material. In early 2018, Panda Bear released a vinyl-only EP titled A Day with the Homies. For sixth full length album Buoys, Lennox reunited with producer Rusty Santos, who he'd last collaborated with on 2007's Person Pitch. The duo worked on material for the new album with the goal of making music that would connect with the tastes of a younger audience. To do this they intentionally tried to replicate and adapt production techniques of the era's popular music. The nine-song album was released in early February 2019. In 2022, Lennox and longtime collaborator Sonic Boom released Reset, their first official joint album after years of working together on each other's projects. Begun during the international lockdowns related to the COVID-19 pandemic, Reset found these old friends pushing each other to new places, with Sonic Boom singing on some tracks where he'd stuck to mostly instrumental input on the pair's previous collaborations. Reset was released in August of 2022 on Domino Records. The following year, Reset received dub remix treatment from one of the genre's stars when U.K. dub producer Adrian Sherwood worked his magic on the album, recreating it as Reset in Dub. In February of 2025, Panda Bear released Sinister Grift, his first fully solo album since 2019's Buoys. Along with Lennox's usual web of electronics and some samples, the album's arrangement included more traditional rock instrumentation than usual, with Lennox playing most of the instruments himself. Sinister Grift was still a highly collaborative affair, however, with guest appearances from Cindy Lee, Spirit of the Beehive member Rivka Ravede, and for the first time on a Panda Bear solo album, input from all of Lennox's Animal Collective bandmates. ~ Paul Simpson

Long one of the most influential and innovative figures on the U.K. reggae scene, producer Adrian Sherwood and his famed On-U Sound label pioneered a distinctive fusion of dub, rock, and dance that made waves not only in roots circles but also in the pop mainstream. His work throughout the late '70s and '80s helped bridge the post-punk and reggae scenes, with acts like the Slits, the Fall, and other more rock-bred bands all releasing music marked by Sherwood's dubby production style. Sherwood continued merging stylistic worlds throughout the '90s, 2000s, and beyond, working with reggae legends like Lee "Scratch" Perry one moment and Nine Inch Nails the next. Sherwood offered up his first solo effort in 2003 with the frenetic digital dub of Never Trust a Hippy, and released several other solo albums from that point on, dotted among his work with other artists. Sherwood remained regularly active as the years went on, producing albums like Horace Andy's 2022 set Midnight Rocker and curating the female-focused various-artists presentation Dub No Frontiers that same year.

Born in 1958, Sherwood first surfaced during the late '70s at the helm of a series of disastrously short-lived labels; he formed On-U Sound in 1979, and counted Creation Rebel, Prince Far I, Bim Sherman, and the Mothmen (later to form Simply Red) among the roster's earliest additions. While the On-U Sound crew's original focus was on live sound system performances, the emphasis soon switched to making records; when none emerged as a breakout success, Sherwood began mixing and matching lineups, resulting in new acts including New Age Steppers, African Head Charge, Mark Stewart & Maffia, and Doctor Pablo & the Dub Syndicate.

Sherwood's distinctive production style soon began attracting interest from acts outside of the dub community, and in 1980 he helmed the Slits' "Man Next Door," followed a year later by the Fall's Slates EP. On-U Sound releases from Public Image Ltd. and the Pop Group also earned the label considerable attention, but reggae remained its focus; Sherwood soon recruited guitarist Skip McDonald, bassist Doug Wimbish, and drummer Keith LeBlanc -- together the onetime house band at the famed rap label Sugar Hill -- and under a variety of names (most commonly Tackhead), the trio brought new power and definition to the company's densely textured recordings. The group also issued several LPs under its own name, as well as teaming with the self-described "white toaster" Gary Clail as Gary Clail's Tackhead Sound System.

By the mid-'80s, Sherwood was among the most visible producers and remixers in all of contemporary music, working on tracks for artists as varied as Depeche Mode, Einsturzende Neubaten, Simply Red, the Woodentops, and Ministry. He became increasingly involved in industrial music as the decade wore on, producing tracks for Cabaret Voltaire, Skinny Puppy, KMFDM, and Nine Inch Nails, and although On-U Sound continued to reflect its leader's eclectic tastes, the label remained a top reggae outlet. In 1994, Sherwood mounted Pressure Sounds, a new label dedicated to reissuing seminal reggae and dub releases from the likes of Lee "Scratch" Perry, King Tubby, Augustus Pablo, Jackie Mittoo, and Horace Andy. The first in a new series of reissues known collectively as On-U Sound Master Recordings, complete with CD-R tracks, arrived in 1997. In 2003, he launched his solo artist career with Never Trust a Hippy, which was followed in 2006 by Becoming a Cliché. Both were released by On-U in conjunction with the Real World label.

Sherwood collaborated with Lee "Scratch" Perry twice in 2010, first for the Mighty Upsetter album, followed by a remix collection taken from it entitled Dub Setter. In the summer of 2012, Sherwood resumed his own recording career with the release of a solo album, Survival & Resistance. A few years later, he began collaborating with dubstep originator Pinch (Robert Ellis). Sherwood & Pinch's Late Night Endless appeared in 2015, followed by Man vs. Sofa in 2017. Both albums were co-released by On-U and Pinch's Tectonic. Also in 2017, Sherwood (billed as On-U Sound) teamed up with Coldcut for the full-length Outside the Echo Chamber. Released by Coldcut's rebooted Ahead of Our Time label, the album included guest appearances from Perry, Roots Manuva, Ce'cile, and others. Sherwood's work with Perry also resulted in the 2019 album Heavy Rain. New production work as well as archival collections of Sherwood-produced '80s material continued as the 2010s ended and the 2020s began. Along with the release of newly unearthed New Age Steppers and African Head Charge recordings, Sherwood worked on new albums from Ghetto Priest, Horace Andy's 2022 album Midnight Rocker, and its dub counterpart Midnight Scorchers. Before 2022 was over, Sherwood released Dub No Frontiers, a collection of tracks inspired by and featuring performances from female vocalists from the U.K. reggae scene and beyond. ~ Jason Ankeny