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"I've been going through DAT tapes in the last week, and I stumbled upon the first DJ Shadow release 'In/Flux' and 'Hindsight', which brought back floods of memories as it was such an important moment in mine and Mo' Wax's history.
I first discovered Shadow on a trip to LA where I was DJing at Delicious Vinyl's Brass club-night. I was given a 12-inch promo by Zimbabwe Legit on the late Dave Funkenklein's label Hollywood Basic, featuring an unreleased remix sampling Loran's Dance on the B-side. The track (DJ Shadow Legitimate Mix) was truly mind-blowing. This unique cut-and-paste sampling remix, which had pretty much nothing to do with the original, was like a record I'd always wanted to hear!
I then started playing it religiously at That’s How It Is at Bar Rumba as a part of my early-night DJ sets. Here, I was starting to forge a new beat-head sound from all these obscure and underground records I was discovering and collecting. The club was the perfect environment for this new sonic journey, which became the foundation of the Mo' Wax sound, and later became known as trip-hop.
I had tracked DJ Shadow's number down from my friend Albee who worked at Tommy Boy Records in New York. He had worked with Josh and thought we would get on well due to our love of collecting records, and having a different more open-minded hip hop approach. This was at a time when hip hop was very New York-driven, and not so accepting of outside, more alternative influences.
I called Shadow that night and we instantly hit it off, talking for hours about samples, international hip hop records from the UK, Tokyo and beyond, the unreleased Ultra Magnetic MCs and Hijack albums and rare records.
I explained about my new record company Mo' Wax, and how I loved his remix, and would he be interested in making music like that for me. This took him by surprise because at the time there were a lot of New York big beat-style hip hop breaks records coming out, like Kenny Dope, and that's what people expected and wanted him to make rather than appreciating the direction he had been trying out.
Even more to his surprise, I asked him to go deeper and explore that world further, and he agreed and the result of that first conversation was this DAT arriving a few months later at the first Mo' Wax office. We shared the office with Rene Gelston of Black Market Records, Fraser Cooke who was selling Pervert clothing, and music journalist Tony Farsides on the Lillie Road in Fulham.
In the office we had a central sound system, and I remember sitting down on my own that evening and listening to The 8th Wonder hand-drawn DAT of two proposed tracks for our first release.
It was a moment I'll never forget, hearing those two mind-blowing pieces of music. If you're ever lucky enough to truly experience magic, that's what happened that evening. It was like hearing something I wished for my whole life - the perfect soundtrack to my world - something truly extraordinary. There is no feeling quite like it in music.
I recall then cutting it on to acetate and playing it for the first time at That's How It Is, at peak time, and again it was one of those moments when everything freezes; everybody in the club connects on a track. There's no energy quite like it. Gilles Peterson ran over shouting at me, "What the fuck is this!" It was a moment when I knew something special was about to happen - a new sound was in town and things would never be the same again."
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