As Heard on Radio Soulwax, Pt. 2

The device

Full album mixed continuously. 45 tracks in exactly 60 minutes. Released 18 June 2002 on PIAS — officially, global CD distribution. Compiled from two hours of mashups played live on BBC Radio 1 (Essential Mix, October 2000) and club-tested 2000-2001.

Unlike Danger Mouse’s bootleg mashups (The Grey Album, 2004) or Girl Talk’s, As Heard on Radio Soulwax Pt. 2 negotiates licenses upstream. The Dewaeles request 187 clearances; PIAS secures 45. The 142 refusals leave the disc fragmentary relative to the original set, but give it its legal legitimacy — the first mashup album legally distributed worldwide.

Structure — the album as set

No isolatable tracks in the pop sense. The tracklist names 45 artists or combinations, but the listen is continuous. Transitions are the real subject: how to move from Destiny’s Child to Nirvana without the listener feeling the seam? How to link Iggy Pop and Salt-N-Pepa across three bars?

Canonical moments:

• Independent Women Pt. 1 (Destiny’s Child) × Smells Like Teen Spirit (Nirvana) — “Smells Like Booty”
• Dreadlock Holiday (10cc) × ragga beat — reterritorialises British yacht-rock
• Lust for Life (Iggy Pop) × Push It (Salt-N-Pepa)
• Adult. × Whitney Houston — cold wave × diva pop
• Vitalic — included as recognition of the emerging Belgian electronic scene

The procedure — writing by collision

Theoretical project: abolish the hierarchy between sample and original. A mashup is not a sample (quietly citing to build something else). A mashup is not a cover (faithfully re-arranging). It is a collision — two existing tracks rendered inseparable by being played together.

Technically, the Dewaeles work binary: compatible tempos (or one sped/slowed), compatible keys (or one pitched), negotiated dynamic balance — one voice over the other’s instrumental, or vice versa. Craft, not algorithm. Each transition has been club-tested before being fixed.

The arrangement — the flow as form

Variable but coherent tempo — around 120-130 BPM for the majority, with strategic slowdowns. No studio-sense arrangement (these are existing tracks, juxtaposed) but DJ-sense arrangement: ordering, transition EQ, punctual filtering, light re-pitch, sometimes an external layer (beat, vocal sample) to weld two tracks.

Mastering unifies the whole. Each source track has its own sonic signature (Nirvana = fat, Destiny’s Child = bright, 10cc = warm); Pt. 2’s mastering homogenises them into a single coherent flow. The mastering does the work, more than the choice of tracks.

Lineage and resonances

Upstream: the bootleg culture of 1990s-2000s (Go Home Productions, DJ Dangermouse before The Grey Album). But above all, the 80s-90s DJ compilation-mix (DJ Premier, Danny Tenaglia, Sasha) — already posing the album as DJ-set. The Dewaeles add mashup’s violence to that tradition.

Downstream: the record influences the entire 2000s decade. Girl Talk (Night Ripper, 2006; Feed the Animals, 2008) explicits the Dewaele thesis by pushing it to chaos. DJ Shadow, Kid Koala continue the tradition. More diffusely, the mashup podcast format that booms post-2005 takes its birth certificate here.

For the Dewaeles themselves, Pt. 2 is the tipping point — they will then cease to be primarily a rock band. In 2004, Any Minute Now will come out, with 2manydjs’s aura in its skin.

Reading under the permanences

Permanence 1 — The DJ-set thinks the album: founding example. Not “an album that resembles a set”. A set made available as an album-object. The difference is crucial: the record does not represent a set, it is a set. The album format, as it existed since the 60s, is reconfigured: no longer a container of songs but a recording of flow.

Permanence 2 — Friction as writing: maximal demonstration. Here, there is only friction. The record contains no original music composed by the Dewaeles. And yet, it is attributed to 2manydjs. The duo’s signature is their choice of collisions and their transition discipline — nothing more. An author’s work without original material. An aesthetic paradox held 60 minutes.

Why this piece and not another: the album is not a piece. It is an editorial choice: analyse As Heard on Radio Soulwax Pt. 2 as a global work, not as one track among others. Coherent with the record’s own thesis — the album is the piece. No isolated track accounts for the project; you must take the 60 minutes as one block.

Critique + listening — global analysis of the album-object, not an isolated piece