Likewise, the “Stem/Long Stem” beat is taken from a simple drum beat from “Run’s House” by Run-DMC and repurposed into a fast-paced, thrash metal style drumming pattern. “Mutual Slump” takes from the intro of Swedish singer Pugh Rogefeldt’s 1969 song “Love, Love, Love,” a psychedelic pop-rock song mind you, and turns it into a somber jazz tune. For instance, he takes sounds from specific musical genres and uses them to represent other styles. Looking closely at the design of Endtroducing…. reveals how keen and resourceful Davis is. I can only imagine the painstaking, obsessive process necessary to make music like this. Davis certainly shows that he is a music editing wizard who can cut tracks together however he sees fit. Titled “Best Foot Forward”, it strings together 12 samples from forgotten hip-hop acts such as Masters of Ceremony, Stezo, and Divine Sounds in a mere forty-two seconds. The intro track quickly establishes the album’s slick production. Songs like “Changeling” and “Midnight in a Perfect World” are sophisticated compositions where all the pieces fit so nicely together that it’s hard to believe that they came from other songs. When experimenting the way that he has, sampling becomes an intricate art form. Unparalleled and nuanced, Endtroducing…. has proven that sampling is more than taking other artists’ music. It’s like building something out of Lego bricks if they could be reshaped and recolored. He also manipulates pitches of melodies and basslines, cuts up drum patterns to create patterns of his own, and finagles the equalization of samples to bring them to the forefront or background of songs. Of course, Davis doesn’t merely lift pieces of music from records and place them into his tracks. Using little more than an Akai MPC60II sampler and a turntable setup, Davis repurposed snippets of songs from other recording artists to create experimental, multilayered instrumental music.
It’s DJ Shadow’s highly praised debut instrumental hip-hop album created almost entirely out of samples. Davis boils down his intentions clearly with a single reflection: “There’s the promise in these stacks of finding something that you’re going to use and, in fact, most of my first album was built out of records pulled from here.” He’s referring to 1996’s Endtroducing…., released through British record label Mo’ Wax. It leads him to create masterful sonic compositions. ”ĭigging is the key to his creative works. “Like I was meant to find this on top, or I was meant to pull this out because it works so well with. “It has almost a karmic element,” he says. It takes a certain sense of obsession to rummage through them, examining the ones that catch his intuition and trusting that something will click with his creativity. To DJ Shadow, born Joshua Davis, digging through thick stacks of records is an art. “He’s the king of digging,” says fellow DJ and producer Cut Chemist in the 2002 documentary Scratch. Instead, he focuses on the clutter, searching, and evaluating. But he doesn’t think or behave like that.
It looks like an overbearing mess, like a hoard guarded by someone who may have a compulsive disorder. He sifts through them in a cluttered basement of a record store in Davis, California. DJ Shadow finds peace among towering stacks of records.
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