FEATURE:
Vinyl Corner
DJ Shadow - Endtroducing.....
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HAVING turned twenty-five…
last month, I wanted to feature an album in Vinyl Corner that has had a few reissues since its release. One of the most assured and astonishing debut albums ever, DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing..... was released on 16th September, 1996. An instrumental Hip-Hop work composed almost entirely of samples from vinyl records, DJ Shadow produced Endtroducing..... over two years using an Akai MPC60 sampler and other minimal equipment. He edited and layered samples to create new tracks of varying moods. I am not sure how many similar albums were around the time DJ Shadow launched this remarkable album. Here in the U.K., the album reached the top-twenty. It was certified Gold by the British Phonographic Industry. One can listen to Endtroducing..... fresh now and be blown away by it. I don’t think that it is dated at all or only made an impact in the 1990s. This is an album that everyone should get on vinyl. A twenty-fifth anniversary release is a perfect buy:
“A seminal, incredibly influential hip hop release (also regarded as pretty much the last word in instrumental ‘trip hop’, a term used a lot at the time), Endtroducing is simply one of the defining albums of the 90s. It is famously also the first record ever made entirely from samples of other people’s records – with a particularly broad array of sources used, many mined from the catacomb-like basement under the artist’s favourite record store in Sacramento, which has long since closed its doors. This is the store pictured by photographer B+ on the album cover and in many other shots included in the package.
To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the album UMC are proud to present this Abbey Road Half Speed Mastered edition. ‘Half-Speed Mastering’ is an elaborate process whereby the source is played back at half its’ normal speed and the turntable on the disc cutting lathe is running at 16 2/3 R.P.M. Because both the source and the cut were running at half their “normal” speeds everything plays back at the right speed when the record is played at home”.
One can hear the passion and sheer hard work that runs right through Endtroducing..... As a high school student, DJ Shadow spent a lot of time creating music from samples using a four-track recorder. He was inspired by sample-based music such as Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. Records like this are at their very best on vinyl. There are a couple of reviews that can be dropped in now, just to give a feeling of how critics have reacted to it. In 2005, Pitchfork reviewed a Deluxe Edition of the mighty Endtroducing.....:
“Endtroducing taps that inner-whatever better than most of the albums of its day, and it swims so easily that it established an entire genre of instrumental hip-hop-- count how many records come out every month and are dubbed "Shadowesque." Building the album from samples of lost funk classics and bad horror soundtracks, Shadow crossed the real with the ethereal, laying heavy, sure-handed beats under drifting, staticky textures, friendly ghost voices, and chords whose sustain evokes the vast hereafter. Even the "look at me" cuts like "The Number Song" didn't break the mood; the album was so perfect and the technique, so awesome that it's still definitive today, and Shadow has yet to top it. (Never mind that if Four Tet could swing a record as proficient as The Private Press, we would throw him a parade.)
For this Deluxe Edition, Endtroducing hasn't been enhanced or remastered, but it now comes with a bonus disc of remixes and singles, including Cut Chemist's fantastic "party mix" of "The Number Song" and Gift of Gab's rhymes on "Midnight in a Perfect World", as well as alternate versions that give a useful perspective on the album. For example, "Building Steam With a Grain of Salt" and "Mutual Slump" omit the overdubbed speech, and without it, the samples seem naked and duller-- which highlights one of the album's subtler strengths”.
Before I conclude, there is another review that I am keen to source. It is from the BBC in 2011. Through the years, Endtroducing..... has won so much love from critics and fans alike. It is a towering work that few have managed to get near (even DJ Shadow himself):
“It’s an uncomfortably common practice in the cult of music critique for writers to overstate the importance of particular albums. Subsequently, long-players by relative makeweights like the Longpigs are talked about amongst scribes of a certain age as lost classics, and the consumer can pick up a deluxe edition of almost any album released prior to 2004, replete with unnecessary ‘bonus’ content that’ll never get played. So allow me to undersell the significance of DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing… LP, the Californian producer’s debut of 1996. It’s alright. It’s got merit. Its influence is definitely noticeable. It can be heard today and sound just as fresh as it did nearly 15 years ago. It did change the face of hip hop, sample culture, and has impressed its presence on next-to-every electronic artist to have dropped a break since its release. Sorry, I tried: like I said, such hyperbole is a mainstay of articles like this.
But in this instance it’s absolutely deserved, as there wasn’t an album released before Endtroducing… that sounded the slightest bit like it. Alright, so actually there were many records issued before its emergence which sounded the slightest bit like it, from a prosaic perspective: as a collection constructed exclusively of samples, obviously clips had surfaced prior to Shadow’s co-opting of them. Among the acts whose material wound up on Endtroducing… are Björk (Possibly Maybe is used on Mutual Slump), Metallica (Orion, on The Number Song), and Marlena Shaw (California Soul, on the wonderful Midnight in a Perfect World). Hip hop had long been scouring record stores for obscurities (and mainstream-successful sorts) to sample – the Beastie Boys’ Dust Brothers-produced Paul’s Boutique is a masterpiece of this art – but never had an artist compiled such a diverse array of lifts in such a fashion that the listener was never once distracted by them. They were only ever absorbed by the album at hand, a standalone work. Endtroducing… remains an incredible achievement where sampling didn’t merely embellish but provide both solid foundations and fantastic frills, core structural elements and orbiting additions.
It’s this bafflingly well-realised approach to Shadow’s arranging – start with a grain of salt-sized snippet of something that appeals, and build an impossibly massive head of steam from it (to appropriate a title from this disc) – that ensures that Endtroducing… hasn’t aged a day. Released at a time when trip-hop was ruling glossy monthlies, via the then-fashionable stable Mo’Wax, it could so easily have collected dust in the fashion of Unkle’s Psysence Fiction (a collaborative affair that Shadow bailed out of after said debut LP); but instead, a play today reveals all the nuances and entrancing passages that hypnotised the listener back when. From the introspective ambience and jazz percussion of What Does Your Soul Look Like Part 1 and the Halloween funk of Organ Donor (brilliantly extended as a B side, and subsequently available on the 1998 compilation Preemptive Strike), to the bombast of The Number Song and the elegiac soul of Midnight in a Perfect World, this is a record that defies shifting trends and neatly sidesteps hindsight’s cruel hand”.
I am going to leave it there. One of the greatest albums ever released, if you do not own a vinyl copy of Endtroducing..... then rectify that now. With gorgeous hugely evocative songs like Building Steam with a Grain of Salt and Stem/Long Stem / Transmission 2 that take you to another world, Endtroducing..... is an album that nobody should be without. Go and grab a copy if you can and witness music…
THAT lifts the soul.