Founded in 1905 as the agricultural outpost of the University of California, Davis is barely discernible from Interstate 80, the highway that slices through Yolo County from the San Francisco Bay are through the state capital at Sacremento en route to the hills of the Sierra Nevada. From the Highway, Davis is marked only by a water tower bearing the inscription "UCD."
Named for a Gold Rush-era dairy farmer, this smallville "cow town" is just the sort of place where you would expect cultural trends and fashion statements to come moseying in, several years after the fact. Yet Davis currently lays claim to an edgy, arty style of hip hop music that has the cosmopolitan cognoscenti of London and Tokyo up in arms and the DJs of those cities scrambling to keep up.
Davis is the lifelong home of one DJ Shadow, a 23 year-old turntable wizard who has been running reconnaissance missions for the so-called "trip hop" phenomenon since before he was twenty. Since 1994, Shadow's impressionistic cut and paste methodology has turned up on a series of records for London's Mo' Wax label, records that have taken the underground (and the hyperbolic British press) by storm. His cinematic, mostlyinstrumental brand of hip hop--- a heady amalgamation of industrial-strength white noise, slinky slow-jam bass-and-organ grooves, dainty EZ-listening trills, old-school scratching techniques, Sun Ra-inspired freakouts, and, always, that soulful beat---has been heralded as the vanguard of the trip hop movement, with the singles "In/Flux" and "What Does Your Soul Look Like?" attracting rabid attention and providing a signature sound of sorts for Mo' Wax.
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