Leeds, UK · dub-jazz

Submotion Orchestra

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Leeds's dub-jazz seven-piece — sub-bass warmth under velvet vocals, headphone music that fills a field, cinematic low-end played fully live.

Submotion Orchestra came together in Leeds in 2009, after an Arts Council-funded event that set out to mix electronic and classical music at York Minster. The seven who took part stayed together as the band's core: Ruby Wood on vocals, Simon Beddoe on trumpet, Taz Modi on keys, Chris Hargreaves on bass, Tommy Evans on drums, Danny Templeman on percussion, and Dom Howard handling effects and production.

The group pairs that rhythm section, keys and horns with production drawn from dubstep, dub and electronica, and Wood's restrained delivery sits above heavy low-end and long, reverberant spaces. The music moves slowly and atmospherically, closer to jazz and soul phrasing than to dancefloor tempos, and on stage the band reproduces studio-detailed electronic textures with no laptop doing the work.

Their first EP appeared on Ranking Records in 2010 and led to a live session for BBC Radio One with Gilles Peterson. The debut album, Finest Hour, followed in 2011 on Exceptional Records, with Fragments arriving the year after. Once the 1968 EP was out, the band signed to Ninja Tune's Counter Records imprint and released Alium, the III EP and Colour Theory over the years that followed.

In 2018 the group started its own label, SMO Recordings, issuing Kites and later two Unplugged collections that reworked older tracks acoustically, a format they took on tour with the Prism String Ensemble. A 2024 EP, Five Points, kept the run going. Their track 'All Yours' was sampled by Bryson Tiller on 'Right My Wrongs', a song that went on to be certified six times platinum.

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dub-jazz