DJ Shadow

Though he put in years of work prior to this release, Endtroducing is where most people first heard Shadow. A hypnotic collage of full-bodied drums, swift scratching, and moody, ultra-obscure samples, this record made him an international star. Often pigeonholed as Trip-Hop, Shadow's work is much more diverse than that. Extremely influential and a definite classic.

For anyone raised on rock & roll, the new world of electronic music can seem like a strange
and forbidding place. From trip-hop to techno, acid house to drum and bass, the myriad
styles and subgenres bear names far more exotic than "punk" and "grunge," and the music
doesn't play by rock's rules. Songs rarely follow verse-chorus-verse formulas, they don't
often have singers, and even when you get a guitar riff, chances are, it's been s... More >

Armed with a sampler, a sequencer, and the black plastic he gave up trying to catalogue in 1989, 24-year-old Josh Davis of Davis, California and London, England distills everything he loves about drumbeats, symph-schlock, and oddball Americana into a 63-minute work with a beginning, a middle, and a to-be-continued. Some under a minute, some over nine, the 13 tracks are designed for headphones--Apollonian even if beat-driven, their only vocals spoken-word and comedy samples that accrue a mysterious fascination without ever revealing their relevance to each other or anything else. Except, that is, for the 30-second intro to the six-minute "Building Steam With a Grain of Salt," in which a square, self-taught drummer explains himself as a reassuring crackle attests to his vinyl authenticity down in the mix: "I'd like to just continue to be able to express myself as best as I can. And I feel like I'm a student of the drums. And I'm also a teacher." And then he chuckles nervously. And then Davis loops that chuckle for a second or two, making of it music and chaos and satire and self-mockery and music all at once. (Grade - A+)