DJ Shadow - Endtroducing.....

We’re sure that you all already know full well, but in a nutshell – for those who haven’t encountered this seminal long player before – originally released thirty years ago this past Wednesday morning, Endtroducing..... was the debut album from American producer DJ Shadow. Developed over a two-year period, the album was built almost entirely from samples, creating a rich and woozed-out sonic tapestry. Although sampling was already central to hip-hop production, (and we previously wrote about the Bristol scene and Portishead’s Dummy) Shadow demonstrated just how far the technique could be pushed when an entire album was conceived around it. Guinness World Records subsequently recognised it as the first album recorded using only sampled sounds.

But it is all so much more than that!

The process behind Endtroducing..... is so central to the album. Shadow approached the studio not as a conventional songwriter arriving with completed compositions, but as a producer assembling music from an enormous library of recorded material. He famously pulled the majority of the samples from the crates of Sacramento’s Rare Records, with the now closed store also immortalised on the record’s iconic cover photo. The album was slowly crafted over two years at the Glue Factory, a recording space in San Francisco that was also associated with other members of the Bay Area production community. The entire 63 minute running-time was woven together using the simplest possible set-up of an Akai MPC60 sampler, one Technics SL-1200 turntable, and an Alesis ADAT tape recorder. An hour-long stream of tiny drum hits, noise crackles, spoken-word snippets, and musical cues in hypnotic layers, all performed by ear and all with the firing of little buttons. There are recognisable drum patterns, melodies, vocals, textures and sounds, but the album is most successful in that the tones are all removed from their original context.

And that is why Endtroducing..... is so special. This is no mixtape littered arbitrarily with fugged-out sonics, the hundreds and hundreds of noises (so densely constructed in fact, that apparently the Mo’ Wax label only attempted to clear a fraction of the most recognizable samples) create one whole, coherent musical environment. Anything from jazz, soul, rock, psychedelia, electronic music and soundtrack material appears within the same track, full of high skilled technique and organic intuition. There is no rapper providing a narrative, no conventional singer carrying the album and very little sense of a traditional verse-and-chorus structure. Instead, Shadow created an album in which the production itself became the performance, occupying an unusual position between hip-hop, electronic music and ambient music. Its beats are unmistakably rooted in hip-hop, but the album’s scope is considerably wider.

Endtroducing..... is one of those funny records where when you know it, you really know it! Some of the clicks and pops between tracks are as locked into your memory as the melodies themselves. A cinematic and deeply atmospheric hour, floating through moods and styles in a dreamlike haze, but never idly. It retains the perfect spot between imagination, technique and innovation. Thirty years on, it’s as hallucinogenic and beguiling as it ever was.