Scientist (musician)
| Hopeton Brown | |
|---|---|
| Birth name | Hopeton Overton Brown |
| Also known as | Scientist |
| Born | 18 April 1960 |
| Origin | Jamaica |
| Genres | Reggae, Dub, Dancehall |
| Labels | Dub Мир Greensleeves Tuff Gong |
Hopeton Overton Brown (born 18 April 1960) is a recording engineer and producer best known for the Dub music he mixed as "Scientist" in the 1980s. A protégé of Osbourne Ruddock, Brown's contemporaries include several figures who, working at King Tubby's, had helped pioneer the genre in the 1970s: Ruddock, Bunny Lee, Philip Smart, Pat Kelly and Prince Jammy. Brown's mixing is notable, in part, for his ability to deconstruct the source material to create sparse, stripped-down arrangements layered with effects (often dramatically changing the tone of the original song).
Brown was introduced to electronics by his father, who worked as a television and radio repair technician. He began building his own amplifiers and would buy transformers from Tubby's Dromilly Road studio. While at the studio, Brown asked Tubby to give him a chance at mixing. He was taken on at Tubby's as an assistant, performing tasks such as winding transformer coils, and began working as a mixer in the mid-1970s, initially creating dubs of reworked Studio One riddims for Don Mais's Roots Tradition label, given his chance when Prince Jammy cut short a mixing session for Mais because he was too tired to continue. His name originated from a joke between Tubby and Bunny Lee. Having noticed Brown's forward-thinking ideas and technical aspirations, Tubby remarked, "Damn, this little boy must be a scientist."
He left King Tubby's at the end of the 1970s and became the principal engineer for Channel One when hired by the Hoo Kim brothers, giving him the chance to work on a 16-track mixing desk rather than the four tracks at Tubby's.
He came to prominence in the early 1980s and produced many albums, his mixes featuring on many releases in the first part of the decade. He made a series of albums in the early 1980s, released on Greensleeves Records with titles themed around Scientist's fictional achievements in fighting Space Invaders, Pac-Men, and Vampires, and winning the World Cup. The music on these albums was played by Roots Radics, his most frequent collaborators. In particular, he was the favourite engineer of Henry "Junjo" Lawes, for whom he mixed several albums featuring the Roots Radics, many based on tracks by Barrington Levy. He also did a lot of work for Linval Thompson and Jah Thomas. In 1982 he left Channel One to work at Tuff Gong studio as second engineer to Errol Brown.
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