Studio One Dub 2 is a second collection bringing together some of the finest dubs from the legendary Studio One Records, Kingston, Jamaica. Dub music was the creation of a generation of brilliant recording studio engineers in Jamaica. But although Clement "Coxsone" Dodd's Studio One is hailed as the greatest of the Jamaican recording labels, and although many talented engineers worked the board at Dodd's Brentford Road studio over the years (including Sylvan Morris, Syd Bucknor, Overton "Scientist" Brown and Dodd himself), Studio One was never typically known as a centre for dub. This is because for many fans the studio's commercial and stylistic heyday was in the 1960s, prior to the rise of dub as a distinct sub-genre of Jamaican music in the 1970s.
By the 1970s, however, dub music was the rage in Jamaica's sound systems. Always the pioneer — and since Sylvan Morris had left the Studio One operation around 1972 — Coxsone supervised the dubs till leaving Jamaica at the end of the decade. This meant that for the most part, for example, the twelve Studio One dub albums released during the 1970s were mixed by Dodd himself, using the moniker "Dub Specialist." Throughout the decade, the mixes became more sophisticated and atmospheric.
Along with the first volume of Studio One Dub, the cuts here demonstrate that Studio One's contribution to the innovative musical form of dub was substantial, and go straight to the head of listeners who feel that the only centres for dub were studios such as King Tubby's, Lee Perry's Black Ark, Channel One, or Joe Gibbs's.
The tracks on this compilation are taken from this period in the 1970s when dub was the cutting-edge of Jamaican music studio production. Most of them are the dub-version flip-sides of rare Jamaican 45s, and none have appeared on CD before.
Sleeve-notes are by Michael E. Veal, author of Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae (Wesleyan University Press, 2007).