Unravelling the Mystery of Shared Mixes
It took me over 15 years to find the origin of a shared 2-step mix, and it all came down to was the right kind of search query.
Back in 2002 I was madly into a genre of music called 2-step, which was a sub-genre of UK Garage. I had all the Ministry of Sound Compilation CDs loaded with the greats like the Artful Dodger, MJ Cole, and too many more to list here.
In fact I collected so many of these compilations that I had numerous track double-ups on these albums. But I didn’t care: the sounds were great, and I was totally addicted to it.
I was friends with a group of 20-somethings that were into doing all the usual things 20-somethings tend to do. And at the time, that included heavily pirating music.
The crew were really into electronic music, but could see that I was a bit lost in their scene and wanted to include me. So they gave me a musical gateway drug that was 2-step.
It was hard to explain why I loved the 2-step sound so much, but after reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2-step_garage#Characteristics it becomes clearer now.
The inventive use of bass-lines and unusual time signatures with the percussive elements just hooked me in. At a time when I was transitioning over from a mostly rock music taste into electronic music, the house music I was being introduced to was a bit monotonous and similar. 2-step blew this problem out of the water for me.
Knowing that I really loved this newly-found genre, one of my friends threw a burned 💿 CD-ROM over to me and said “give this a listen”. The CD featured no title other than the words “2-Step” scrawled on the top of it in black Sharpie.
It was MASSIVE! The mix opened with a real banger of a remix that I recognised the original song from: Cold and Intimate by Nitin Sawhney.
Another track that stood out was a hugely popular hit by Basement Jaxx called Where’s Your Head At.
I had a problem that was proving to be very frustrating for a person new to a genre: no idea about the artist who actually produced the mix. 😡
There was no metadata in the burned CD that I could check on Musicbrainz (remember Musicbrainz!).
Back in 2002, Shazam was still pretty primative at identifying non-mainstream songs, and we didn’t have the AI-driven grunt of the Google Assistant “What song is this” feature. I just couldn’t crack the artists no matter how hard I tried. None of my friends knew who the DJ was that compiled the mix because the mix had been handed around and around.
About three years later in 2005, I got a PC that I could upload my music library to, and tried again to find the artist for this mix when Musicbrainz failed to tag the imported track correctly in WinAmp.
Still no luck.
I resolved in my mind that I would never know who the artist was and settled on a name for the mix: “2-step Session Set”.
This is how it remained until 2018, when I was re-listening to a great remix CD by Nitin Sawhney.
Track nine was the same one that opened the “2-step Session Set” and got me hooked: Cold and Intimate (Landslide remix).
I had listened many times to this track, but I didn’t bother paying too much attention to the artists responsible for remixing the tracks.
I really enjoyed reliving the track again, and my thoughts drifted back to the “2-step Session Set” disk with this song featured. Then something clicked in my brain.
Search for “landslide 2-step”. This archived search result came back.

Could it be? The year seems right. And it has Landslide in the title. “What’s the worst that could happen”, I thought to myself.
The site loaded but the keywords didn’t jump me to the information directly. So Ctrl+F got me to this:

Here’s where I started to get VERY EXCITED.
It turns out that the folks at Hospital Records had been digging through their archives and uploading past mixes from their vast library of electronic goodness to their http://youtube.com/hospitalmix channel.
Tim Land (the blogger) turns out to be Landslide: the artist I’ve been enjoying for years!
So now I have the Artist, and what I think is the same mix I had pirated for me years ago. The mix that popped my electronic music 🍒 and paved the way for many more artists to make their way into my ears.
In the YouTube comments, some cluey YouTuber recognised the tracks. On closer look… haha, it was Landtube (surely Tim Land’s account).
So here’s the track listing, from the guy who mixed the track back in 2002.
- Some day — The Beard (Phuturistix remix)
- Cold & Intimate — Nitin Sawhney (Landslide remix)
- The drum — Nordstadt Union
- Tainted love — Slum Village (Zed Bias remix)
- MG4SS — Mondo Grosso (Wide Boys remix)
- Slow jam — Jameson
- Check dis — F.O.S Project (Zed Bias remix)
- Don’t let go — Mondo Grosso
- Where’s your head at — Basement Jaxx
- Return to forever — High Contrast (Landslide remix)
- Alicia Keys — Falling (MJ Cole Dub)
- Its a rush — Dj Matt
By a casual google search I managed to unlock a 16 year old mystery that formed a cornerstone of my enjoyment of electronic music.
Tim, if you ever read this, thank you for putting yourself out there and making amazing music. Thank you also for producing this absolutely cranking mix all those years ago for 🏨.
It’s still one of my favourite 2-step Sessions. Perhaps you can give it a proper name so I can rightfully name it. And remaster it so I can officially but it. 😉
