DJ Shadow: 30 Years of Endtroducing

About this show

For over 30 years, Josh Davis has expressed his passion, taste, and values through the music he creates as DJ Shadow. The name alone evokes a high watermark for instrumental hip-hop and composition. From his first masterpiece Endtroducing…, to the genre-hopping UNKLE release Psyence Fiction, to the otherworldly elegance of The Private Press and its iconic single “Six Days,” to his underrated Bay Area celebration The Outsider, his work in the ‘90s and first decade of the 2000s is as essential as it is hard-to-pin-down. In the 2010s, Shadow released the sprawling The Less You Know, the Better, with its muscular forays into rock music, and closed the decade with The Mountain Will Fall and Our Pathetic Age, both very ambitious, risk-taking albums that boasted some of his best rap collaborations by working with Run the Jewels, Nas, and De La Soul, among others. If there’s a single red thread across this career, it's his restless ear, always searching to rescue some forgotten gem from the dustbin of music history or a fresh blast of sound from the cutting edge. It’s a practice Shadow learned as a young boy, enamored with collecting comic books, baseball cards, 12-inch records, and precious songs captured to cassette from the radio airwaves late at night in northern California. With great seriousness and love, he will describe the second-hand transistor AM radio on which he first heard Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message,” when he was 10 years old. Or his mind-expanding encounter with Public Enemy’s “Rebel Without a Pause” and that single’s howling saxophone blast. At the heart of DJ Shadow’s musical project is deep listening. “I’m always trying to please or impress the most advanced listener,” he says. The type of aficionado who will respect the layers upon layers of synth that went into making a sound that can’t be readily identified but will make you want to share the track with a friend and say, “This part right here.” The first sampled words heard on DJ Shadow’s forthcoming album Action Adventure, his seventh solo LP, are “all my records and tapes.” In fact, they are some of the only words heard on what is almost an entirely instrumental release; they’re a kind of thesis statement for an album that has its roots in the drifting, destabilizing days of the COVID lockdown. Action Adventure is an inward-looking project, made by Shadow alone without any collaborators. Action Adventure tells the listener: “This is about my relationship to music. My life as a collector and curator. All my records and tapes, and no one else’s.” The result is the most exciting DJ “Ozone Scraper” kicks off the album without preamble, just big, propulsive drums. It has the feeling of transportation, of jet engines lifting the passenger somewhere impossible. One of his favorites on Action Adventure, “Ozone Scraper” is an invitation to strap in and also sets the table for the kind of deep listening Shadow loves. The advanced listeners will marvel at the kind of “special effects,” as Shadow puts it, that went into creating the elusive synth noises. Like a child marveling at a summer blockbuster, you wonder: How did he do this? “You Played Me” is a miracle that happened by pure chance. Inspired by the eBay tapes, Shadow created a beat that had the crackling percussion and burbling synths of classic ‘80s R&B, like a lost René and Angela hit. “I loaded up the instrumental and looped it on my computer to play forever,” he explains. Then he started auditioning records in his collection that he hadn’t processed yet—an experiment to find the vocal in the haystack. “I dropped the needle on an acapella of a really obscure R&B 12-inch from around ‘84, ‘85 and I thought, ‘That actually works.’” Still, he wasn’t entirely sure, and he sent the song to his label as a reference for a potential collaboration… whoever it was needed...