IDC: Cheat-mixing, Mash-ups & Bootleg Booty

"I first started making bootlegs because I got fed up with carrying records to clubs. I got everything on CD then I started doing a bit of cheat mixing where I thought I could pre-record the mix at home and take it out with me to play on CD. Doing that process led me to start trying to do stuff at home that I couldn't do live and that's how I started."

From John Truelove sticking a Candi Staton acapella on top of Frankie Knuckles Your Love, to Richard X reworking Gary Numan's Are Friends Electric, combining two disparate records together to make something new, has always been a lucrative way of making a name for yourself in the music business, and IDC is the latest, to embark down the well trodden route. Prolifically busy, he's bootlegged everybody from Alter Ego and the White Stripes to Prince with Avenue D, along the way merging Daft Punk & Eurythmics and Rapture and Andrea Dorea. He's also taken the trouble to place George W and Tony Blair in classic war-mongering mode over
Massive Attack merged with the Plastic Ono Band, on his most interesting track to date Safe from US.


"The whole bootleg mash-up thing seemed to be a bit of a gimmick and I thought no-one's trying to say anything so yes, that track is trying to make a point," says IDC. "I wanted to do something that said something."

"I did it as a Christmas end of year feel good track, and for all the vocal samples, I sat down for an hour went on the internet and trawled Google," he explains.

"It's amazing what happened with it because the track is two years old and the good thing about it is the amount of response we've had from America. I've had people telling me they're using it for the sound track to their film dissertation and you think "yeah, that's alright'."

Two years on, he's also receiving accolades from the music press, influential UK radio station XFM and most significantly MTV, who broadcast exclusive IDC mashup commissions every Saturday night on their MTVNE network and sitting in a warm West London pub on a cold winter's night, he's as enthused about his own fortunes as the electro-disco- mashup world he's increasingly making his own.


"It's this right time, right place concept and everything is starting to coalesce," he says.

"And it's not just London either. It seems to me that the continent was more accepting of what we were doing at the beginning of the year and now we're finding these little pockets everywhere of people experiencing the fallout of clubbing supposedly being dead.

There's a definite visual aspect, which seems to be tying in with this clash of guitars and electro music and it all sounds really contemporary. It doesn't have a name yet either, you cant say "it's like that stuff Felix Da Housecat does' or Thin White Duke remixes', it is all that, but it's more as well."


Skrufff (Jonty Skrufff): Why do you think this scene is coalescing now-

IDC: "Because of the internet it's easier to find like-minded people. You can see by somebody's links, for example, what they're into. People come across IDC from people's blogs or internet radio shows which is fantastic. About a year ago I had the idea that the mash-up thing would become the first internet music medium but I actually now think it's going to be this electro thing, though the trouble is there's still no name for it; because it's not really electro. And with electroclash it's a bit like punk in the way that you had Iggy Pop and the New York Dolls doing punk, but a couple of years too early. In a way, the whole electroclash thing has been like that. Maybe Fisherspooner are the Iggy Pop of whatever is about to happen.

With mash-up you also had magazines like Jockey Slut and DJ Mag all over it a few years ago, but it was more novelty based rather than aimed at the dance floor. Now you can put Christine Aguilera with the Strokes and it works- it works bloody well. What I've been doing is mash-up for the dance floor. This rock dance crossover h

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