In 1998, hip-hop is changing and James Lavelle can’t sit still. Too busy, ever fidgety, his mind plunges earnestly into opaque shards of our precious youth culture - Star Wars, graffiti, skateboarding, hip-hop, London club nights, beats he’s looking for, remixers, phone calls to return, whatever. Ninety-some records later, the Mo’ Wax architect knows not the fate of his own label, nor that of a sickly global music industry hell-bent on CREAM. But at least hip-hop is changing forever.
 

The man has been prolific, releasing a steady glut of classic underground beathead beatz and nailing a vision by being everywhere at once. Have you ever redefined sections in a record shop? From an early acid-jazz 12-inch by the Groove Collective to riveting La Funk Mob-meets-Richie Hawtin-induced records, Lavelle’s Mo’ Wax conglomerate has altered the face of club music as we know it.
 

Rewind selector to 1991. A Tribe Called Quest releases their finest album, The Low End Theory, and unofficially close out hip-hop’s golden age. A wild ride of immense creativity and honest urban dialogue pretty much comes to an end. Mo’ Wax begins on the other side of the Atlantic shortly thereafter on a cash loaner from Honest Jon’s record shop and an insane lot of ideas.
 

Propelled by a skinny 19-year-old, it unleashes an astounding run of groundbreaking music and street art that’s influence becomes far reaching: R.P.M, Swifty, Takemura ("extreme musical individuality for that time," says Lavelle), DJ Shadow, Futura 2000 ("he’s just everything you could be at his age, totally inspiring"), DJ Krush, Howie B., La Funk Mob ("the original Parisian beat headz"), Attica Blues, Carl Craig ("one of the true greats in music"), Tortoise, Blackalicious, Luke Vibert, DJ Die ("just has that Bristol funk!"), Peshay, Money Mark, Ramellzee, the Dust Brothers, Simon Richmond ("really talented musician who I have the utmost respect for"), Mike Mills, Air, Pharaohe Monch ("to me the best lyricist in contemporary hip-hop"), Phil Frost and so on. Club Music and the independent mindset has never been the same.
 

So it should come as no surprise then, that since 1995 he’s scratched and clawed his way to creating the most ambitious all-star concept album the underground has yet to see. The three-year UNKLE album, sculpted by Lavelle and DJ Shadow (original wizards Tim Goldsworthy and Kudo from Japan’s Major Force are no longer in UNKLE), was an exhausting process. Psyence Fiction sums up all those years, along with a fair share of blood, sweat and tears. Now it’s over. They’re relieved, worn out - and 100 percent satisfied.
 

The much-talked-about album - which includes Kool G. Rap, Richard Ashcroft (The Verve), Thom Yorke (Radiohead), Mike D (Beastie Boys), Badly Drawn Boy, Latryx, Metallica’s bassist, and singer Alice Temple - accurately trumpets the culmination of Mo’Wax’s six-year history. It’s Lavelle’s dream project that DJ Shadow was assigned to manifest.
 

London, 1998. The winds of change are swirling. If Carl Craig’s Innerzone Orchestra can record a new form of music with Sun Ra’s drummer, Bjork can share MPCs with the RZA. If 4 Hero can make Ben Harper’s soul even more righteous and Roni Size can construct a new rap language with inner city griot Saul Williams, then Puffy’s shit should be history. And if it takes a kid from London to build and destroy, so be it. The shape of things to come had begun.
 

In 1992, Shadow solicited American labels with the same beat he sent Mo’Wax. Perhaps the fact that he liberally sampled Mexican rock records and early-‘90s punk 7-inches throughout Psyence Fiction will not surprise those already converted listeners who can get open to an electro 808 hump over a live, blistering string section ("Celestial Annihilation").
 

Nothing lasts forever - patterns emerge, but systems always change. Grand ideas and ways of thinking help break order with chaos. It’s cyclical and inevitable every couple of decades or so. Remember the first law of gravity? That which rises must eventually fall. Pop does eat itself and, in turn, underground ideas surface.
 

"James [Lavelle] is the idea man, but he can’t actually do it; he can’t actually program it," admits DJ Shadow.
 

But what James wants, James usually gets. "UNKLE is not meant to represent Mo’Wax," Lavelle insists. "It’s meant to represent a project which has been a relationship between myself and Shadow, and a vision I’ve had for the past x amount of years. I wanted it to be very special. I wanted it to sort of be everything we were about."
 

It started off on a different note. The first attempt at recording included Tim Goldsworthy, Kudo, Mario Caldato Jr. and Money Mark in early 1995 in Los Angeles.
 

"I went back to London with the first batch of music and in August of 1995 I was at a point of sort of disbelief," recalls Lavelle. "Nothing sounded the way I was thinking. I was pissed off and not happy with things at all. But then we did this one track with Richard Ashcroft [an epic song of unparalleled emotion entitled "Lonely Soul"] and that was the one moment that set the benchmark and the tone to make you understand that you could achieve what you wanted to. At that point Josh [DJ Shadow] and I really started to realize it was worth it."
 

"In March of this year," observes DJ Shadow, "I finally had to sit James down and say, ‘It’s time for this to end.’ I mean I had to turn everything down for a year and a half. So now, there’s a ton of things I need to get out of my system. I’m very happy with the record we made and I’d do it again in a heartbeat. Absolutely. But it was draining.
 

"The UNKLE record was a record I knew I had to make from the beginning because I didn’t want to make another record on my own, holed-up in a box," adds Shadow. "Endtroducing... was just me alone, working in a little box. Of course it was something I had to do on my own. But I didn’t want to become this studio messiah. So this album allowed me the possibility of working with other people - Kool G. Rap, Richard Ashcroft, Badly Drawn Boy. Getting to collaborate with Thom Yorke, for example, was amazing. It was very stimulating and something I needed very badly."
 

Of the 11 songs that make up the LP, there are no absolute, hands-down classics, yet the sum of the whole is far greater than that of the parts alone. It’s an audacious attempt at changing the way music is made. From the clattering devastation of "Guns Blazing (Drums of Death Pt. 1)," the album’s first song with lightning vocals from Kool G. Rap, to the way it ends with the sweet whisper of Thom Yorke’s poetic "Rabbit In Your Headlights," the thing that’s classic about this Psyence Fiction is the attempt - to actually have the balls to try it. Gotta keep movin’. Can’t sit still.