Originally released in June 1998 as Jungs & Mädels 03.
www.discogs.com/Various-On-A-Dub-Tip/release/255916

It was 1998. We had mobile phones and e-mail addresses, but no Facebook yet. The 20th century was coming to a close, with the millennium bug threatening to halt all computers.
Better to rely on analog technology, for the time being.

We were interested in beats, bass lines, and echoes. We had an archaic, gigantic drum computer, the Dr. Böhm Computerband 2000. We even had a Roland Space Echo, the same model that Lee Perry had used. And a lot of other gear, some of which may have been digital. (We weren't so narrow-minded.)

To hold a vinyl record with your own music on it in your hands was, of course, a big dream. But there were hardly any pressing plants left, and pressing an LP cost about as much as producing a CD. This we had already done several times — with the result that boxes of unsold CDs lay around everywhere. The vinyl record may have been pronounced dead, but people had also discovered that CDs weren’t that sexy.

When the border to Czechoslovakia opened, though, things started moving again. There was a pressing plant in Loděnice, and ordering from there was not only cheaper, it didn't have to be a minimum of a thousand records. You could order tiny editions — 100 or even only 50 copies. The records came by air freight, and you had to pick them up at the airport. You signed some customs papers, and then boxes full of records appeared on a conveyor belt. It was pretty exciting.

We had tried a seven-inch at first. It wasn’t very loud, didn’t sound particularly good, but hey, it was vinyl, with our own music on it! Crazy. You had to have a “label” of course — call it a company, a gang, or whatever. We called our label “Jungs & Mädels” (“boys and girls”), and of course we were itching to make a long-playing record next.

Dub was a genre under which the different approaches that we took could somehow be subsumed. The idea was: we’ll make a nice compilation out of our tracks, and then everybody can get as many records as they like. In the end we ordered 300, and they all went somewhere. No boxes of unsold copies. I have exactly two copies left, but only one of those is in the correct cover.

Vinyl was, in fact, hardly dead in 1998. On the contrary, there were so many records that some of them didn’t even get real covers. Techno, house and hip hop often came in black or white, unprinted sleeves that sometimes had a hole in the middle — so you could read what was written on the label, or see that it, too, was unprinted. Which was of course the maximum of cool.
Sometimes there’d be a sticker with some artwork. That’s how we wanted to do it, too. For our first important pitch, we weren’t quite ready for total anonymity.

Our headquarters were in Hamburg’s Karoviertel. That’s where the strings were pulled, and that’s where the fax machine stood. Annette selected some of her photos, some of which she had taken in New York, the mecca of unprinted record sleeves. Sven worked out the right shade of black for the sticker: dark-green black on a black sleeve, that would look cool.

But the mixing desk was in Jochen’s flat in Berlin. The fun with dubbing only begins with a big mixing desk. You need some sends, to put delay on discrete signals. And mute buttons, to be able to drop an instrument out for a couple of bars. With those techniques, practically anything can be turned into a dub version.

Lars had tracks, Jochen had tracks. Lars had one on which Jochen played bass. Let’s think of a title — how about “6000 Dub”? (Since 2000 was drawing near, the stakes had to be upped signficiantly.) The Top Banana Trio got dubbed. Peter operated on his boxes to produce an ambient specialty. Bente from Off Ya Tree also had something that fit in. Just give me the DAT, how many copies do you want to order? That was the spirit back then.