Dub maestro Elijah Minelli takes an ancient English folk song, A’Soalin’, and rearranges it as a 21st century reggae tune.

Elijah Minelli is a mysterious British dub producer who makes music that draws a line between dub reggae and English folk music, via the interwoven syncopated styles of Jamaican dancehall and Colombian cumbia.

Producing and playing all the instruments, he’s also created a whole imaginary world around his records, based around the township of Breadminster (a fictitious dairy town that has banned milk) and its local authority, Breadminster County Council, of which he is the self-appointed Night Tsar and artist-in-residence.

For his latest album, Perpetual Musket, he has taken four old English folk tunes and rearranged them in a reggae style, sung by four different reggae singers – then added dub versions of each one.

Jamaican singer Little Roy adapts an Old Testament hymn with an anti-war message called Vine & Fig Tree, while Earl 16 (once of Leftfield) updates Lifeboat Mona, folk legend Peggy Seeger‘s 1959 song about a tragedy at sea that’s particularly pertinent in today’s climate of hysteria about “small boats.”

Meanwhile, Bristol reggae singer Joe Yorke converts Wind & The Rain from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, popularised in 1967 by a famous countertenor of the time called Alfred Deller, into an eco-ballad for our times.

This tune, Soulcake, is based on an old traditional ballad called A’Soalin’ about an All Souls’ Day ritual when poor folk would knock on the door of farm owners and prosperous neighbours in a tradition that is thought to have inspired both carolling and trick or treating.

Best known in a 1963 version by squeaky-clean folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary, Minelli’s version – sung by dancehall legend Shumba Youth – makes it sound simultaneously sweet and sinister.