assive Attack called their album Protection. The Mad Professor remixed the album in haunting deep dub, and called it No Protection. He lied. It does protect; like dark liquid nostalgia. It protects, terrifying.

I first heard it in the summer in Spain at the indoors hour of the afternoon. Old city flat, dark in the shadows of marble floor and tiles and dark wood and deep porcelain sink, high ceilings, coolness coldness at the floor, shutters shut shutting out the impacted heat and dust and stillness outside. Five six people around me on sofa on chair on rugs dozing slumbering smoking passing, coffee, the clutterings of lunch rabbled around the wine bottles one half full beading puddles onto the wooden table, thin china salad bowl drowning dying lettuce strips in watery oil. Fish bones. Heavy ashtrays dealing with the afternoon shadows and gentle murmurings and the CD was playing a dark cold warm marble shadow.

More than music. A quantity filled the spaces. Dark deep defiant base spaces resounding around the languid air, pulsing pulsing, snatches of vocals cast spinning into the void echoing around the trail off into the depths, reggae guitar chords settling into a rhythmic pace, moving, and then leaping after the memory of the singing voice, gentle piano sequences settling calmly then following the echoey path. The bedrock bass booming constant dark and secure, heart bass life pulse secure. And yet not secure, as it is tempted by the swirling fragments of melody, continues defiant, then slips into the darkness, losing the haven. All elements of the song now soar, circling away away from the rhythmic core, wise in their wanderings - and the bass regains hold on the road and enraptured carves its wide noise loud loud and deep, enocouraged by the snare, encircling the wayward vagrant melodies of female voice, guitar and piano. Harmony is captured, they all delight, the girl enters the phase, grasps it, holds it, and - spins off echoing - returns - and off again into the abyss - pulling the companion melodies with her. Mysterious. Wise. Alluring yet terrifying.