Endtroducing….. album cover
Endtroducing…..

DJ Shadow

1996
Mo Wax

A pioneering and influential album built entirely from vinyl samples, most of them lifted by DJ Shadow from records in the basement of now-defunct Rare Records store in Sacramento. Endtroducing is perhaps the most hip hop of all trip hop albums, the beats bonafide, the scratching true to the craft, his Akai MPC sampler mimicking hip hop DJ beat juggling. It’s an album built from parts of lost b-sides, last-ditch efforts, records that failed and that no one ever heard, reconstructed into new forms, each sample a snippet of someone’s long-forgotten hopes. In the 2001 hip hop documentary Scratch, DJ Shadow refers to the piles of old, obscure vinyl where he painstakingly hunted for the raw materials for his debut album as “like a big pile of broken dreams” and there’s a genuine sense of yearning contained in his reassembled beats and chords, which is all the more impressive when you remember how they are created. Easily one of the finest trip hop albums.

Harold Heath

Don’t get it wrong: sampling was always legitimate music. It’s just that Josh Davis was one of many who grew up believing that fact was never in doubt, and his reaction was to give those musical components the same treatment that Miles Davis did to jazz at the turn of the ’70s. It’s crossover, but to a place that not a lot of people even know exists, hip-hop finding a spectre of a voice in the absence of an MC and using cratedigger obscurantism to make a masterpiece of hauntology.

Nate Patrin

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