Dj Shadow Endtroducing Review
Magnhild Mongolo
xp
Yes that one. I've got it on Headz but I specifically want the one that starts with some guy talking which I believe is the single version. I have it but when I loaded it up yesterday I discovered it was cracked. Indestructable cds, pah!
Hey, I just found another copy. I have so much shit I don't even know I have. Sorry to have taken up your time. Anyway, while I'm here can i just say I am very much enjoying the DJ Shadow's early records what I am listening to presently. So, classic!
last time I saw him play he got huge boos for anything from the outsider. Eventually he stopped and spent a while explaining to the crowd that he wasn't going to apologise for experimenting, and he'd never make the same record twice, and he had to keep on trying new things.
The Private Press showed that he had been expanding his listening in contemporary music beyond just backpacker hip hop/trip hop and the sources of those samples. That was an explosive time in music there, a lot of disparate factions mingling styles.
What I meant by 'disparate styles' on The Private Press was mostly drum & bass and affiliated styles that were booming in the Bay Area around that time. You can hear also the echo of James Lavelle in that polished sheen over some of it, and I'd guess Lavelle was probably a guy vacuuming up influences from up and coming styles.
they only became sample-based collage producers on that album though, whereas Shadow's 1993-94 stuff is very much in the vein of Endtroducing - and the Avs had the problems of having albums that weren't in the vein of SILY rejected by Pav, and then the two who did the collage stuff becoming unable to work together, possibly related to various health issues of the one who didn't quit, which then further slowed down his process.
brimstead makes a very valid point for sample based music. when you think about it, dj shadow was probably destined to fall into that mode. he literally built his early eps and endtroducing on his favorite records. and everyone's list eventually ends, so it only figures that he started to just look for similar records to build similar sounds on with the private press. i still think private press is really good, but ultimately disappointing coming after endtroducing.
He's doing a show at Webster Hall in February. Not expensive if you get tickets at the box office (online fees add 50%). Is he still worth seeing? I love Endtroducing and The Private Press but I noticed on setlist.fm that lately he typically does only one track from each, maybe two.
There were occasional nice moments on the new album but it was definitely not my thing. I like when an artist follows their muse but he's moved away from anything I found interesting about him in the first place, which like, good for him, do your thing man.
Something I think about a fair amount with musicians and artists is that an artist is a kind of character or persona, and that's true musically too. I don't think it should just be "musically whatever I feel like doing, whether or not it has continuity with my prior work." Like that's what side projects/alternate names are for. Or some artists with very long careers have "periods" like Dylan or Bowie. But Shadow's career just feels like it kind of zigs and zags all over the place without clear purpose. Oh well, Endtroducing remains one of my all-time favorite records, and there is at least a compilation's worth of good to great material from the rest.
I probably said this upthread but he's clearly made an effort to become a producer using modern tech that doesn't rely on sampling, but there are millions of those and it doesn't show off his most distinctive gifts (his ear and his digging).
RJD2 went the route of learning to play all the instruments and record them to sound like vintage samples...it still doesn't have the magic of his sample work, but it's way better than DJ Shadow's synth-based beats.
I don't get sampling laws. Wouldn't rights holders want to price sample usage so that they can make money off them? I know it's complicated for a collage like Endtroducing but you'd think they'd have an incentive to figure out a scheme for assigning percentage of revenue so those works can be made and sold.
I don't think it's very codified, if you're doing it by the book you need to reach out to all the publishers and come to an agreement with each one. At the very least it's a big hassle that might end up with having to lose/replace/redo some samples, and then the artist probably isn't making much money from the record if it's entirely sample-based. But since no one makes money off records anymore, maybe he should just say fuck it and making Endtroducing 2?
He'd already set a few rules here: while, working on U.N.K.L.E.'s Psyence Fiction, he had allowed himself the leeway of using musicians to play things when sampling wasn't going to work, for The Private Press he refused to use any musical ingredients that didn't come from previously released records. The hugely influential Brainfreeze mix, made with Cut Chemist in 1999, found the pair only allowing themselves to use 7" 45rpm singles. Its all-45 follow-up, Product Placement, incorporated numerous 7"s released to promote some product or other, and recreated a fans' favourite sequence from Brainfreeze using different versions of the same tracks in a kind of "cover version" of part of the earlier mix.
The delight in accomplishing such absurdly, arbitrarily and unnecessarily difficult tasks was clear: so it was little surprise that there would be challenge he would set for himself here, and that it would be of another order of magnitude altogether. With the notable exception of its introductory cry of "What you gon' do now?", which comes from a 1977 United Artists release by The Whitney Family, on 'Monosyllabik' Shadow forced himself to make an entire track using only sounds he could make out of the first two bars of that privately pressed late-period funk 45. He began by cutting the two bars into 32 pieces, then set about attacking them in the studio, using only outboard gear and analogue equipment - no plug-ins or computers. Microphones were set up to record the sound being played in different ways from different speakers, then fed back through the system and spat out in new shapes, each to be reforged, sifted, rearranged and reconstructed in a process he compared to stop-motion animation.
FWIW, re: ticket prices, the Webster Hall show is $35. If you purchase it online (via axs) they add $17 in fees. Webster Hall still runs a box office, but it's only open during evenings when they have a show going on (which thankfully is most evenings in general) - if go there when doors open (typically 6 or 7pm), you can get tickets for upcoming shows without paying those additional fees.
I only started doing this in the past year or two, and the savings really add up. The only indoor venue I've gone to that doesn't do this is City Winery (only members get fees waived). Anyway, the show's four months away, so I doubt it'll sell out imminently.
The Private Press still has it. I like that record overall, I should probably revisit. A few of the tracks are up there with Endtroducing material for me, but it starts to feel sort of scattered in the second half of the album, like an awkward back and forth between slow moody beats and fast, frenetic beats, at least that's my memory of it.
Wish someone would drop an all sample based album that's blatantly illegal to show how beautiful the artform can be without legal limitations and just release it to the public domain as an act of protest or something
I wonder what the post-Ableton warping Endtroducing is. Or maybe we only got mashups/edits/Girl Talk once sampling became easy and user-friendly. Thinking through all the L.A. beat scene stuff there were definitely samples, but it leaned much harder on original production.
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