Various

The Echo Beach dub label started up about five years ago in Hamburg, Germany, inspired by Martha and the Muffin's 1980 new wave hit. The first "Echo Beach" remix appeared on a sampler called Far Away In Time and was so good that Mark Gane (guitarist and songwriter) commented, "it sounds like the original song was shot into outer space, hit a planet and floated back to Earth in pieces!" Truly the song has been an international phenomenon and Mark Gane was as surprised as anyone when a song he wrote at age 17 became an international hit. "We heard stories about it, like 'oh yeah, I was cruising down the Nile when I first heard it,' and people in the UK, 'oh you're from Canada, so can you help me find my long lost brother who went missing after the war?'" The tribute by Echo Beach imprint label Select Cuts is really a tribute to the easy listenability of good dub music mixed with new wave cool. You may or may not recognise the melody as reworked by 13 German dub artists, but you will enjoy that smooth, wallpaper-y feel in all of them. For a tribute album, it's oddly unified and strangely impossible to get sick of. Contributors include Sushi Club, Gabriel le Mar, Martha and the Muffins themselves (one of the best tracks on the album), Deep Dive Corporation (featuring new original samples from Martha, recorded by telephone across the Atlantic), Groove Corporation and Thomas Fehlmann. Mark Gane lives in Toronto with his wife, original vocalist Martha Johnson, who is still reeling from the success of her Juno Award-winning children's album Songs from the Treehouse. They are currently working on a new Martha and the Muffins project. "These are things you can't control anyway, so you might as well enjoy them. I can't say anything bad about a song that's lasted a quarter of a century and seems to be going into the next century." He looks forward to hearing the album.