HENCH RIVIERA

he concept of the mashup – that is, creating new songs by blending existing songs together – reached its zenith in 2001. It’s an established and vintage formula of course, stretching right back to the dawn of music itself, and touching down over the generations on such luminaries as Frank Zappa, John Oswald and Negativland, before enjoying a startling renaissance at the turn of the millennium. The ethos was given a label in the mid-eighties when David Quantick decreed in the NME that the cyclical recycling of ideas meant that ultimately pop will eat itself (a certain band took their name from this – see if you can guess which one…), and it all came to a head when 2manydjs released their first legal mashup album, the iconic ‘As Heard on Radio Soulwax, Pt.2’, in 2001. One album, 45 tracks, 187 samples, the world’s first ever commercially official mashup record proved that the art form can be far, far greater than the sum of its already great