Day 125: DJ Shadow – Endtroducing…
I went for another classic today. I needed a solid, semi-mellow record to have on in the car so I thought I’d finally listen to Endtroducing… by DJ Shadow. Lord knows I needed a bit of distraction from the news today. I’m otherwise a fairly environmentally conscious lady but my singular act of eco-terrorism is that if things get stressful, I will go cruising around.
Album cover courtesy of Mo’ Wax
I’ve spent a fair few minutes googling most influential albums in whatever genre to find stuff I’d like to listen to in the course of this project, and Endtroducing… comes up frequently. DJ Shadow’s 1996 debut holds the Guinness World Record for being the first full-length album that’s made completely by sampling and it’s a seminal record in instrumental hip hop, with its approach to sampling as its own separate art form.
DJ Shadow, or Josh Davis, started off his career as a disc jockey at a student radio station at UC Davis. After graduating, he started touring Europe as a DJ, but he says it wasn’t his thing: he didn’t have the right vibe for it and he just wasn’t making the sort of music that people wanted to dance to, saying that the records that he gravitated to were more head-nod albums than danceable music.
He was signed to the UK label Mo’ Wax and spent around two years creating his debut with only a MPC60 sampler, a Technics SL-1200 turntable, an Alesis ADAT tape recorder and the encyclopaedic music knowledge that he’d gathered from his record collection. The local records store where he’d go crate-digging allowed him to go explore their cavernous basement of records they didn’t actively have on sale, and he’d go digging for gold through these piles:
Just being in here is a humbling experience because you’re looking through all these records, and it’s sort of like a big pile of broken dreams, in a way. Almost none of these artists still have a career, really, so you kind of respect that.
The resulting album is a bit of a treat. It’s hard to describe what it really is, some 30 years later it still sounds unique, fresh and interesting. I didn’t know anything about it on the first listen and was hearing it through my aforementioned not-very-clear car stereo, then I finished the album at home when I was cooking, then read about the album and listened to it again. At first, I thought it was a good record, something to listen to when you’re working or maybe put it on at an afters. But it’s definitely one that you need to be able to hear properly and that you need to know about to truly appreciate it.
The samples range from a Metallica sample on “The Number Song” to a Björk sample on the slightly spooky “Mutual Slump”, to the organ sample on “Organ Donor” which samples a deep cut by the previously reviewed Giorgio Moroder, which if you’re a frequent flyer on this blog, you’ll know that that’s right up my street. There’s also a sample from Twin Peaks on “What Does Your Soul Look Like Pt. 1”.
It’s an enjoyable record that’s made its way to the musical canon with very good reason, and I can see myself listening to it semi-regularly in the future. Interesting album, interesting guy, a solid 9/10. I’m trying to listen to the seminal stuff and this one isn’t one of them where it’s fun to listen to because you can hear what’s been built as a result of it being a groundbreaking album, it’s good just on its own.