Endtroducing.....

Official Review

Endtroducing..... is the debut album by DJ Shadow, the stage name of Josh Davis, released in 1996 on the British label Mo’ Wax. The record is built almost entirely from fragments of records found in second-hand shops: jazz, rock, film scores, spoken-word recordings. Davis works with a sampler and two turntables, and the result is a largely instrumental album in which voices appear only as material that was already recorded. The tracks are long and develop in layers. A drum loop at a medium or slow tempo carries the structure, and melodic fragments, keyboard chords, strings or horns are added and removed above it. Variation happens through subtraction or substitution, without real changes of section. On Building Steam with a Grain of Salt and Midnight in a Perfect World the material changes little from bar to bar, and the interest lies in how the sounds are placed in space and in their worn, dusty timbre. The record is heard as a single course, with passages connecting one track to the next and spoken fragments acting as punctuation. Why Hip-Hop Sucks in ‘96 takes a position in the debate over the genre at the time of its release, but on an album with no rapper the statement is left to the title and the editing. The work is patient, almost archival, and the quality of the chosen samples matters as much as the technique used to combine them. The record connects to the Mark Fisher and Kodwo Eshun dossiers. With Fisher the link runs through hauntology: each fragment is a voice or an instrument detached from the situation that produced it and returned as a presence with no precise source, and the album sounds like the archive of a music nobody remembers in full. With Eshun it runs through the sampler seen as a machine that builds an imaginary sonic place from real materials, an idea close to the sonic fiction that dossier describes. Endtroducing..... is regarded as a reference point for instrumental hip-hop and for the downtempo scene that gathered around Mo’ Wax in those years, and it influenced a good deal of later sample-based production.