Kitchen Feedback

I was very one-track, one-genre minded in my youth. If I liked a band, I stayed in that lane. If I liked a genre, even better. Why complicate things?

Then I heard a mashup of MGMT’s Kids and Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit and something clicked.

It completely changed the way I listened to music. I realised that songs don’t necessarily belong in the neat little genre boxes we put them in. More importantly, I figured that to create a mashup like that, you’d need to know and understand a ridiculous amount of music — different genres, different eras, different tempos, different vocal styles and, most importantly, what makes a song work.

That rabbit hole eventually led me to Isosine.

If you don’t know who Isosine is, listen to the track below. Seriously. It will explain Isosine better than I ever could.

Isosine was a mashup artist who became known for doing far more than simply throwing two songs together and hoping for the best. His work could make completely unrelated artists sound as though they had always belonged on the same track.

Pop, rock, metal, hip-hop, electronic, indie — nothing seemed particularly safe.

And then there was the copyright problem.

Mashups sit in that wonderfully messy space where creativity and copyright law collide. You’re taking existing recordings, often from completely different artists, and transforming them into something new. From a creative perspective, it can be brilliant. From a legal perspective, things get considerably less straightforward.

Which probably makes Isosine’s catalogue even more fascinating. A lot of this music existed outside the traditional music industry machinery — uploaded to the internet, shared, remixed and passed around by people who simply loved what they were hearing.

My favourite remains We R All Fireworks, but the one track I think everyone should hear is Isosine’s Korn/Taylor Swift mashup of Twisted Transistor and New Romantics. It is exactly the sort of ridiculous combination that shouldn’t work — and somehow does.

That, to me, is the magic of Isosine.

And then he disappeared.

The last major run of Isosine releases was years ago. The Mashup Manifesto series stopped in 2017, and for a long time it seemed like that was it.

Then, out of nowhere, Isosine returned in May 2026 with 過去は過去 (Mashup).

After roughly seven years away, there was suddenly a new Isosine mashup on YouTube.

Which brings me to the question I really want answered:

Where is the real Isosine now?

We know the name. We know the music. Historical sources identify Isosine as Steven Nguyen. But beyond the music, there isn’t much of a public trail telling us what he’s doing today.

And perhaps that’s fitting.

In an internet culture where everyone seems determined to turn themselves into a brand, Isosine somehow managed to become memorable while remaining almost completely anonymous.

Maybe that’s part of the appeal.

I don’t really need to know who Isosine is.

I just want to know what he’s listening to — and, more importantly, I really hope he makes more mashups. His music is the kind of stuff I can put on and happily lose myself in while battling through a busy workday.

Give my favourite Mashup Manifesto a listen below.

Listen to all the albums on Bandcamp.