When I got to art college I was lucky enough to fall in with some like minded muso dudes. ‘Stevie B’ Bruno, Joe ‘Baron Samedi’ Lashbrook, Farooq ‘Faz’ Khan and I formed a heavy beats and smokes ‘collective’ named ‘Voodoo’, spending days and weeks planning our schemes for world domination. Cut off from the entire cultural world in leafy surrey we obsessed endlessly over gilles & norman’s radio shows and over music mags like Straight no Chaser, rigorously compilling epic ‘want’ lists. Such was the power of our nascient musical fervour that we would literally be running to Universal Sounds/Mr Bongos/the basement of Daddy Kool on our monthly record buying visits. Of course none of the records we wanted were available- all floating seductively out of reach in the ether of exclusive promoes and cdrs.

One of these unreachable tracks was the by a guy called dj shadow. Leaking from the jazz pages, hype about a track called influx had started to penetrate more traditional music press. It was nowhere to be found (of course) but this track was. Pre-dating the influx 12″ by a few months and trickling to London on import I picked it up in blackmarket or somewhere similarly off the beaten path for mowax beat junkies.
Coming back home to the Third Floor in the holidays I would be armed with stacks of vinyl goodness (and eventually my own 1210s), like this. Of course I had no idea that DJ shadow would eventually be a big deal. Listening to it with my bro, all we could muster by way of critical appraisal was ‘damn those drums sound amazing !’

DJ Shadow and the Groove Robbers-Entropy (parts C/D/E).mp3