Meet our April 2026 Mix of the Month Winner – Toxic Shame Squadron

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Each month at Decoded Magazine, our Mix of the Month competition throws up plenty of surprises, but few entrants arrive with quite the same delightfully askew résumé as our April 2026 winner. Step forward Toxic Shame Squadron, the one-man DJ crew operated by London’s Ian Lane, whose mission statement reads less like a typical promo bio and more like a love letter to the late, great Solid Steel radio shows of old.

Lane’s whole approach to DJing prioritises the peripheral, the hard-to-pin-down and the genre-defiant, threading them together into something that feels coherent without ever feeling predictable. You’ll find him every week on Twitch running his DJ challenge streams, or popping up at comedy nights across London with his trusty FLX4 in hand, where he’ll either rattle through his own personal music charts or, if the mood takes him, foist impromptu DJ tutorials onto unsuspecting punters. His 2025 tour show, Toxic Shame Squadron Teaches You How Not To DJ, is exactly the sort of self-aware, anarchic proposition you’d expect from someone who treats curation as both an art form and a stand-up routine.

Away from the decks, Ian runs the YouTube channel Remix Review Guy, dissecting and critiquing the musical multiverse with the same forensic curiosity he brings to his sets. He’s also a partnered Twitch speedrunner under the name RuffledBricks, and at the time of writing sits at number two in the world for Worms Armageddon, which surely makes him the only Decoded Mix of the Month winner with a global speedrun ranking to his name.

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His winning mix is a properly hypercurious affair, exactly the kind of context-finding, dot-joining selection his bio promises. Sit back, hit play, and let Toxic Shame Squadron guide you through the peripheries.

How did you approach your mix from a creative and technical standpoint – what story were you aiming to tell, and how did that influence your selection, sequencing, and transitions?

I regularly go for daytime walks to make my housemates think I’m more outgoing than I actually am. Many of my walks end up leading me through industrial estates and, even though they’re public rights of way, I always have this internal sense of dread that I’m intruding upon private land – that someone’s gonna jump the palisade, shout “You don’t work here” and throw me into a skip. So I figured I’d try and make a mix to soundtrack that experience and the inevitable attempt/s at escape if that happens. A lot of the tracks on this mix sound to me like functional machines worn down by wear and tear – lots of creaking power tools and big slabs of metallic percussion – but there’s a human element always at least partly visible. It’s the sound of bulldozers, corrugated iron, reluctant security guards and short-sighted town planning.

I tend to focus on an atmosphere, a landscape, or a scenario when devising a mix. Rarely do I think about any specific musical genre, and if I do it’s usually some bespoke made-up hybrid genre like post-punkstep, in-dub-strial, ambient skiffle etc. As such, I was a bit worried about entering a competition with a list of ‘accepted genres’ to work within, but I was really glad trip-hop was one of them as it’s a style that inherently celebrates broad tastes. 90’s trip-hop encompassed elements of hip-hop, soul, reggae, post-punk and electronica, and although we’re long outside its commercial heyday (for now at least), it’s continued to evolve and infuse many adjacent styles ever since.

Largely though, my approach is seldom “Let’s do a techno mix” or “Let’s do a d’n’b mix”, and more about finding little sonic links that unify disparate artists, particularly those whose work tends to slide outside of obvious genre parameters. How can Photek and The Sisters Of Mercy find common ground? What context allows room for both Odesza and the drummer from Slayer? What if Basement Jaxx shared space with meticulous sound artists like Forest Swords and Katie Gately, or experimental gothic folklorists like Damsel Elysium and Francine Thirteen? These are the kind of questions that make me excited about DJing.

Were there any particular production or mixing techniques you used to maintain cohesion or enhance dynamics across the mix? For instance, did you favour long blends, harmonic mixing, or any custom edits to help the narrative flow?

I started learning to DJ many years ago on vinyl with progressive house, so my default inclination is towards long gradual blends, but as my tastes have shifted and expanded out I’ve found that sometimes you need to be more bespoke. My collection currently contains a lot of pretty idiosyncratic tracks that haven’t necessarily been explicitly crafted to be mixed, and with those you tend to reach for whatever it takes to bring about an at least half dignified transition: short sharp cuts, big dumb sound effects, tiny excerpts of beats or drones to bridge between disparate styles, tracks that already sound like two or three songs crammed into one just to throw people off. If I took LinkedIn seriously, I’d probably use this paragraph as an example of my abilities in ‘problem solving’.

I imagine a lot of my mixing techniques would make many seasoned club DJs wince, or at least heavily side-eye. I’m not necessarily always going for smooth or clean transitions – sometimes a chaotic pile up of noises or a sudden rug pull makes for a far more engaging listening experience than glistening perfection. I switched entirely to digital DJing a couple of years ago via the DDJ-FLX4 with Rekordbox – I do miss the pageantry and big artwork of vinyl, but for my genre-unifying ambitions I’ve found that digital feels so much more intuitive. And yet, there are little transitional mistakes or moments of dissonance in this mix that I’ve opted not to edit out, to try and make it feel more human. In an age where AI seems hell-bent on sanitising a lot of artistic expression, it feels important to keep that hand-made feel, no matter how digital the equipment.

How have your musical experiences and influences shaped your sound?

Back in the day, Lee Burridge was the first big name DJ I saw state in an interview that the most interesting records were not the hottest new promos but just stuff he’d find whilst rummaging through record shops, and I took that advice strongly to heart. I started rifling through all the oddities in HMV Portsmouth’s vinyl section and found that I enjoyed almost anything more than the prog house and trance 12″s I’d been buying for two years. I ended up with a bunch of Warp and Ninja Tune stuff, various Soul Jazz compilations, obscure hip-hop singles, 60’s psych folk albums that Four Tet used to shout out, post-rock albums that Pitchfork would wax lyrical over…and very quickly it became like “I don’t care how hard this is all going to be to put together, I’d rather play this.”

The DJ mixes I’ve been inspired by over the years are the ones that are eclectic in genre but blend everything together like it’s no big deal: Coldcut’s 70 Minutes Of Madness, DJ /rupture’s Minesweeper Suite, Radio Soulwax’s Mehari, Scratch Perverts, DJ Bus Replacement Service, various FabricLive CDs and countless Solid Steel mixes. They’re all stylistically diverse yet structurally coherent and that’s what I try to convey with my mixing. I do a regular Saturday afternoon DJ challenge stream on Twitch in which I am contractually obliged to fit ten randomly chosen tracks I’ve never DJ’d with before into a continuous mix, regardless of genre, mood, tempo etc. and that’s really helped shape the way I put music together.

That said, I’m not really sure where one goes to hear this kind of DJing in public these days. Despite journalistic phrases like ‘post-genre’ being tossed about in the music press, most clubs seem to be more stylistically territorial than ever. Eclectic DJing almost seems to be treated as this archaic gimmick you’re only allowed to do in the corner of craft bars with a box of old 7″ records, which is strange given that most people tend to enjoy numerous styles of music rather than just the one or two. If anything, genre-specialism seems like it should be the gimmicky way of doing it, surely?

Anyhow, thank you so much for running a competition that encourages entrants to push beyond the constraints of the typical DJ mix. Long may it continue!

Tracklisting

  1. David Cain – War Of The Worlds
  2. Pole ft. Fat Jon – Slow Motion (Acapella)
  3. Debby Friday – Tear The Veil
  4. Il Quadro di Troisi – Sfere di Qi (Atom™ Remix)
  5. Photek – Pyramid
  6. The Sisters Of Mercy – Never Land (A Fragment)
  7. Mouse On Mars – Rerelease Hysteresis
  8. Amani + King Vision Ultra – Sun Screen
  9. Boards Of Canada – You Could Feel The Sky
  10. African Head Charge – Push Me Pull You
  11. Girls Chat Room – TV Turkey
  12. Dead Fader – Raw Food (Roly Porter Remix)
  13. Rra – Long Game
  14. Forest Swords – Chain Link
  15. Damsel Elysium – You’re Mine (Mabe Fratti Rework)
  16. Coffin Prick – Smooth Rubber Ailment (Roadhouse Remix)
  17. Namahage – WakuWaku Doom
  18. Joshua Idehen – Learn To Swim, Pt. 1 (Krust Intuitive Assignment Remix)
  19. Basement Jaxx vs. Metropole Orkest – Drill Loops
  20. Maral ft. Brenna – Shy Night
  21. DJ Haram ft. Abdul Hakim Bilal – IDGAF
  22. Decha – Chebechu (Nicola Cruz Remix)
  23. Elvin Brandhi & Lord Spikeheart – INTRACLOUD666.6
  24. Mouse On Mars – Maus Mobil
  25. Wu-Lu – Blame
  26. Dave Lombardo – Vicissitude
  27. On Man feat. F-M-M-F – Squares And Triangles
  28. On Man feat. F-M-M-F – Squares And Triangles (Katie Gately Remix)
  29. Mandy, Indiana – 2 Stripe
  30. Francine Thirteen – Black Doves Of Dodona
  31. Moin ft. James K – What If You Didn’t Need A Reason
  32. Soccer Mommy – Unholy Affliction
  33. Theodore Shapiro – Muzak Kier Hymn (Odesza Severance Remix)
  34. Deli Girls – I’d Rather Die (Acapella)
  35. Fog – CheerUpCheerily

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About the Decoded Magazine Mix of the Month

Our Mix of the Month competition is open to DJs worldwide, regardless of profile or experience.

For more information, including rules of entry and where to submit, head here.


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About the Author

Loves long walks along the beach, holding hands and romantic 80's power ballads, partial to electronic music and likes to make the odd mix or two.