Here is what I know:
The Scientist album was originally released on Clocktower in the early 80s. Clocktower went out of business when Brad Osbourne died. His family sold the remants of the label to a Canadian guy that operates "Abraham", a real shady outfit. Some of the Abraham stuff is marketed as "rare unreleased material" or whatever. Some of these albums are very iffy, just reprints of legit releases with new track titles and cover art. Be careful buying anything on Abraham or anything you see on Clocktower, which is basically Abraham now. As for the quality of the actual record, it's okay and I've seen worse. From what I can tell the source probably wasn't the original master. Vinyl was pressed at Rainbo, and the quality of the jacket is pretty horrible. Layout (not the orig. cover art) looks like something a five year old would've done on M.S. Paint.
Now, it gets more complicated. Scientist had a dispute with Greensleeves, which issued a bunch of albums by him in the 80s. Jamaica had no copyright law when this stuff was recorded, and under old British law, the producer (i.e. the person that pays for the recording) owns the masters and all the rights. That would be Henry Junjo Lawes, and he sold the rights to Greensleeves. At the time these Scientist dub albums were recorded Scientist was just the mixing engineer on the album, and didn't play any instruments or write any songs. Since he was paid for his engineering work (i.e. making a dub), a U.S. court held that under the controlling British law at the time he didn't have any rights to the albums. However, I think I read somewhere that Scientist is still suing Greensleeves in other countries and these cases may not be resolved. Greensleeves has not put any of the albums back in print for awhile, I'm guessing due to the pending litigation. They wouldn't want to press up albums on CD and vinyl that could only be sold in the U.S. and nowhere else.
Re: Jamaican vinyl, any records pressed there are going to be iffy in quality. Watch out for Studio One represses made from recycled vinyl and pressed using old, worn out plates. If you care about sound quality, I would say stick with U.S./Euro/U.K. pressings where you can. One advantage to your DJ set up over what I'm using is that a bad pressing isn't as likely to jack up your styli or anything. At some point, I'm thinking I'm going to set up a second turntable with a DJ cart and conical stylus so I don't have to worry about damaging my cart on my main TT if I want to play records that are badly pressed.
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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/04/2015 12:53AM by LionsMouth.
