It's insane, scary, trippy, very dope and the most exciting thing to happen to hip hop for years. Dr Dre on magic mushrooms? Sven Vath doing jeep beats? You're getting there.

Andy Pemberton digs the new breed.

'IN Flux' was first heard late last year, released on the left of field and jazzy Mo' Wax label. A 12 minute epic, 'In Flux' feels like an intelligent techno or ambient record. It's got the mixed up bpms, snatches of spoken word samples, the epic strings and tinkling melody lines, plus some bizarre sounds floating in and out of the mix - all designed to give your cerebellum a run for its money.
But there's no doubting its full-bloodied hip hop credentials - the slow (and I mean slow) dope beats and the wigged out scratching make sure of that. It's hip hop in a flotation tank, possessing a mystical vibe that after just one listen tells you it's time to open the box marked 'groundbreaking'. It's a goddamned musical trip.
"I don't take acid," states DJ Shadow, as clearly as he can after 30 hours in the studio and no sleep. "When I was working on 'In Flux' people told me the music took you somewhere that may be similar. It's the track I'd always wanted to do, not heeding any unwritten laws of hip hop. "
Instead the 21 year old Californian just laid down some beats he liked and then used the sampler as an unlimited instrument, putting down melodies, inventing noises and throwing in snippets of spoken words whenever he felt like it.
"The beat has to carry it," explains Shadow, "I rarely have a musical loop in mind. When I go into a studio to do tracks my emotions carry me. "
The result is hip hop untouched by the vagaries of West Coast rap fashion. It bears no resemblance to Dre, Snoop or any of that mob. Neither does it resemble the jazzy side of things expounded by the Japanese backward-cap boys across the Pacific. How did Shadow escape the influence of his peers? Easy. He didn't have any.
Brought up in Davis, California, a small college town of about 40,000 inhabitants and almost none of them into hip hop, Shadow had one close friend in the 7th grade who shared his love of rap. There were no block parties for Shadow to DJ at, so crowd pleasing was never going to be high on his list of Things To Do Today. Working in classic bedroom boffin stylee, Shadow reckons his splendid isolation was a blessing in a beany.
"I think one reason I could develop my own thing was because I was without any competition," he says simply.
After messing around with four track tapes for years, it was only when the first hip hop boom dropped off that an 18 year old Shadow felt he had something to offer and decided to to step into the hip hop fray. He remixed Zimbabwe Legit's 'Doin' Damage', a mix which came to the ears of Mo' Wax supremo and youthful jazz Don Juan James Lavelle.
"It changed my attitude," says Lavelle. "Jazz lacked the power of beats. Shadow had that."
Lavelle persuaded Shadow, who was only dimly aware of Acid Jazz and house music, to do the damage for his label and hey presto, the distilled bizarritude of 'In Flux'. Now artists like Paris's La Funk Mob and RPM are turning Mo' Wax into one of the most progressive, on it labels in Britain. At Fat Cat Records - London's One Stop Techno Centre - the stuff's getting snaffled up like nobody's business.
"That Mo' Wax stuff is very, very popular " says Andy at Fat Cat. " It's a very open minded label."
Listen to the 'Parisian Funk Technicians' by Le Funk Mob on the 'Tribulations Extra Sensorielles' EP and it's not hard to understand the popularity. For the first time funk services your feet and your head with bumpy, chunky beats and trippy effects dancing happily over the top. Or check RPM on their new single '2000'. An intro drifts on the ambient tide before being turned over by waves of chunky beats and weirdo effects that include morse code, Hammond organ snatches, Cape Canavaral radio messages and God knows what else. There's a new obsession with original sounds previously unheard of in rhyme-centred hip hop, and usually found in the twin towers of techno and house.
"We are very inspired by sound," confirms Stef who with Jo 2000 and Adjay makes up Brighton's RPM. "It can be anything, but rather than drift off into ambient we are very much into beats."
Mark from Happy Daze agrees "It's as experimental as house stuff and techno stuff. We can sell it alongside our techno stuff. "