About

- The Analog Vault // Essential Listening -

A seminal and monumental game changer in the realm of instrumental hip-hop, DJ Shadow’s 1996 debut album on Mo' Wax sounds as fresh and original today as it was over a quarter century ago. While sampling was always a core tenet of beatmaking, this suburban Californian producer took it to levels that nobody ever dreamed of. Limitless and boundaryless, DJ Shadow’s sonic collages here are as abstruse as they are unpredictable.

Pieced together on his Akai MPC60 sampler, a Technics SL-1200 turntable and an Alesis ADAT tape recorder - and built entirely on snippets pulled from obscure vinyl - Endtroducing… is an ever-shifting, ever-restless maelstrom of melancholy and soulful introspection – a masterpiece of its time. - The Analog Vault

Ask the NoCal turntable nerds, the trip-hoppers, the frat boys, the hippies or the ravers stoned on the beach at sunrise: Endtroducing... is deeply spiritual. Not in the conventional sense, but in the spirituality of the soul that lives in your chest and got there from the ether and returns to the collective unconscious-- the one you feel when you feel things. That's the spirit that saves us from being fleeting and disposable: If I necked with that one girl that one sunset, with Endtroducing on the car stereo, then no matter who else did the same thing, I'm me and that moment's still mine. Dig?

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.) - Pitchfork

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Label: Mo'Wax / Island Records
Format: 2x Vinyl, LP, Album, Gatefold, Reissue
Reissued: 2024 (Original: 1996)
Genre: Electronic, Hip Hop
Style: Instrumental, Downtempo, Cut-up / DJ, Trip Hop
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