In 1993 I’d been working for a year or so in my first music business job at the indie Hip-Hop label, Profile Records as A&R under the guidance of vice-president Gary Pini. Also in 93, the two owners of Profile split up. And because Gary & I had put together several successful Techno & House compilations, the remaining partner offered Gary & me our own electronic music imprint.
Gary suggested that since I had a successful club night called NASA focusing on the exact music our label would be releasing, we could call the record company NASA MUSIC. However, my partner in the club thought that Profile should pay for this, even though the name actually belonged to a government space agency. Long story short, we didn’t have the name issue sorted by the time this album, our first release needed to go into production. So even though a double 10” vinyl set had gone out as promo as NASA MUSIC, the final CDs & cassettes were released on Profile.
I’m incredibly proud of this mixtape, primarily because it was the first UK Jungle album to come out in the US. Also, Gary suggested we reach out to Simon Reynalds, who’d just written the first article for a mainstream American publication, Spin Magazine, about this new dance genre, to see if he would write the liner notes for the album. Simon went on to write some of the best ever music history books, including my fave Rip It Up & Start Again.
It’s also pretty incredible that I picked 5 of my fave UK labels, Moving Shadow, Reinforced, Production House, Suburban Base & Formation, & simply said, ‘can we license 5 tracks from each of you to make up this 25-track mixtape compilation?’ And the 5 hottest DNB labels of the day all said, ‘sure’.
I asked Dave Nodz, who was doing the art & graphics for Suburban Base if he'd create a robot character for front cover for the album, and then Rebecca Meek, creative director for Profile took Dave's drawing & fleshed out a truly amazing package for both CDs & cassettes.
Thanks to Emory Marvin for sending me the cassette! I’ve never had one till now. 31 years late but better than never.