

Decades before the term indie sleaze was ever uttered, there was Trash—the Monday night party hosted at London club The End by DJ, remixer and impresario Erol Alkan. During its run from 1997 until 2007, the club night saw early performances from Bloc Party, Peaches, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Hot Chip and tons more, ushering in a post-Britpop scene that tracked post-punk’s revival, electroclash’s emergence and the latter’s adjacent mashup style of bootleg production and DJing. While Trash may not have been the first club “playing Daft Punk to the rock kids”, as James Murphy’s character in LCD Soundsystem’s “Losing My Edge” intoned back in 2002, it definitely did a lot for bridging two often disparate musical factions. 2manydjs—the DJ-specific guise of Belgian brothers David and Stephen Dewaele, aka Soulwax—were Trash’s most hosted act, and this set, recorded live on 30 August 2004, is the perfect snapshot of the era. There’s energetic house from Felix da Housecat. There’s a David Bowie mashup. There’s a particularly garage-rockin’ Van Morrison in Them. There’s Sonic Youth. There’s a stretch of the mix that blends Van Halen, Motörhead, The Cramps and Primal Scream before shifting gears into 808 State techno (and then back into pitched-up rockers from The Dandy Warhols and ZZ Top). In all its adventurousness, the mix underscores something fundamental about both dance and rock music: It’s shamelessly, hedonistically fun, but it always adheres to the beat that propels it forward.