RhoDeo 1249 Beats

Hello, more Beats but of the thoughtful kind. It was very difficult to pas over DJ Shadow in the mid nineties his Endtroducing had all critics drooling, now being well aware of the groupthink of critics I've always held some reserve. As i look at a coverpic that shows a couple of young men browsing vinyl, clearly an image directed at the critics as something to identify with.. and they did big time. Well in case you haven't gotten around to it..N'Joy

In the years following the release of Endtroducing..... high praise has continued to be forthcoming. In a review of the album's "Deluxe Edition" in 2005, Pitchfork awarded Endtroducing..... the maximum score of 10.0/10.0, saying that it "... 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."

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Davis grew up in Hayward, CA, a predominantly lower-middle-class suburb of San Francisco. The odd white suburban hip-hop fan in the hard rock-dominated early '80s, Davis gravitated toward the turntable/mixer setup of the hip-hop DJ over the guitars, bass, and drums of his peers. He worked his way through hip-hop's early years into the heyday of crews like Eric B. & Rakim, Ultramagnetic MC's, and Public Enemy, groups that prominently featured DJs in their ranks.

DJ Shadow began his music career as a disc jockey for the UC Davis radio station KDVS. Through the college radio station, Shadow began releasing the Reconstructed from the Ground Up mixtapes in 1991 and pressed his 17-minute hip-hop symphony "Entropy" in 1993. His tracks spread widely through the DJ-strong hip-hop underground, eventually catching the attention of Mo' Wax. During this period he was significant in developing the experimental hip hop style associated with the California-based Solesides record label. His early singles for the label, including In Flux and Lost and Found (S.F.L.), were genre-bending works of art merging elements of funk, rock, hip hop, ambient, jazz, soul, and used-bin found records.

Although he previously released several original works (during 1991-1992 for Hollywood Records) by the time Mo' Wax's James Lavelle contacted him about releasing In/Flux on the fledgling imprint, it wasn't until his association with Mo' Wax that his sound began to mature and cohere. Mo' Wax released a longer work in 1995 -- the 40-minute single in four movements "What Does Your Soul Look Like," which topped the British indie charts -- and Davis went on to co-write, remix, and produce tracks for labelmates DJ Krush and Dr. Octagon plus the Mo' trip-hop supergroup UNKLE. He eventually formed the label Quannum Projects in 1999 out of the previous label Solesides. Shadow's first full-length work, Endtroducing....., was released in late 1996 to immense critical acclaim, in fact the music press fell over eachother like lemmings in praising Shadow. Endtroducing would make the Guinness World Records book for "First Completely Sampled Album" in 2001. The only pieces of equipment Shadow used to produce the album are the AKAI MPC60 12-bit sampling drum machine.

Given that Endtroducing was a masterpiece of subtly shifting texture, Preemptive Strike almost seems purposely incoherent, even though the tracks are sequenced chronologically. The jerky flow can make the album a little difficult to assimilate on first listen, but it soon begins to make sense, even if it never achieves the graceful flow of the album. Several of the selections on Preemptive Strike were available in different forms on Endtroducing -- parts four and one of "What Does Your Soul Look Like" are in their original forms here, presented along with one and three, and there's the "extended overhaul" of "Organ Donor." All of these are significantly different than the LP versions, and "What Does Your Soul Look Like" is necessary in its original, half-hour, four-part incarnation. But the key moments are the seminal "In/Flux," which arguably created trip-hop, and "High Noon," the dynamic, fuzz-drenched single that was his first single release since Endtroducing. Those three A-sides are reason enough for any serious fan of the debut to pick up Preemptive Strike, but the B-sides and "Camel Bobsled Race" are equally intriguing, making the package a nice summation of DJ Shadow's most important singles through the end of 1997.

Nearly six years after his debut production album, the proper follow-up, The Private Press, was released in June 2002. The following year Shadow released a mix album, Diminishing Returns, and in 2004 he released a live album and DVD, Live! In Tune and on Time. In 2006, he signed a deal with Universal Records, and released his long-awaited third solo album, The Outsider, but instead of following the blueprint he used on his past two records, Shadow enlisted help from Bay Area rappers. DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist have created three popular mixtapes entitled Brainfreeze, Product Placement, and the recent The Hard Sell. These mixes fuse jazz, funk, and soul in the framework of a cohesive concept. They toured in 2008 in support of their mixtape The Hard Sell with Kid Koala opening for them.

He toured frequently during the next few years, but released no material until 2010, when the single "Def Surrounds Us" teased a new album. Issues around rights clearance delayed the release during 2011, but The Less You Know, The Better finally appeared in the fall, heralding a return to his sample-based hip-hop.


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Somewhat sloppy, it almost doesn't matter given the scope and originality of the result. Moving from a kinetic, signature Shadow opening through up-tempo funky breakbeats and stoney, textured, downbeat hip-hop, it's easy to see how influential "In/Flux" was on a generation of musicians looking for somewhere to take hip-hop.

DJ Shadow and the Groove Robbers - In-Flux-Hindsight (flac  95mb)

01 In-Flux 12:08
02 Hindsight 6:59

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Endtroducing..... is structured completely out of sampled elements, including hip hop, jazz, funk, psychedelia, old television shows, interviews and percussion tracks. The entirety of the album was composed on an MPC60, a machine which Shadow would later pass on to Chief Xcel. The album has been cited in Guinness World Records as being the first album created entirely from sampled sources.

As a suburban Californian kid, DJ Shadow tended to treat hip-hop as a musical innovation, not as an explicit social protest, which goes a long way toward explaining why his debut album Endtroducing... sounded like nothing else at the time of its release. Using hip-hop, not only its rhythms but its cut-and-paste techniques, as a foundation, Shadow created a deep, endlessly intriguing world on Endtroducing, one where there are no musical genres, only shifting sonic textures and styles. Shadow created the entire album from samples, almost all pulled from obscure, forgotten vinyl, and the effect is that of a hazy, half-familiar dream -- parts of the record sound familiar, yet it's clear that it only suggests music you've heard before, and that the multi-layered samples and genres create something new. And that's one of the keys to the success of Endtroducing -- it's innovative, but it builds on a solid historical foundation, giving it a rich, multi-faceted sound. It's not only a major breakthrough for hip-hop and electronica, but for pop music.

DJ Shadow - Endtroducing (flac  367mb)

01 Best Foot Forward 0:48
02 Building Steam With A Grain Of Salt 6:41
03 The Number Song 4:38
04 Changeling/Transmission 7:51
05 What Does Your Soul Look Like (Part 4) 5:08
06 (Untitled) 0:24
07 Stem/Long Stem/Transmission 2 9:22
08 Mutual Slump 4:03
09 Organ Donor 1:57
10 Why Hip Hop Sucks In '96 0:41
11 Midnight In A Perfect World 5:02
12 Napalm Brain/Scatter Brain 9:23
13 What Does Your Soul Look Like (Part 1-Blue Sky Revisit)/Transmission 3 7:28
 
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Peculiarly titled “Excessive Ephemera,” disc two is more or less an alternate take on the entire album. Sequence-wise, the track list is nearly exact to that of the album, only replacing the original tracks with reprises, remixes and demo versions. Of these alternate renderings, the ones that tend to work the best are those more in touch with their respective originals. The easy exception to this would be Cut Chemist’s enthrallingly detailed rehash of “The Number Song.” It bears a close enough resemblance to its original so that it’s fairly recognizable, and it sounds enough like Davis’ own production so that it transitions well with the rest of the disc’s selections.

 A less convincing remix, though, is Peshay’s shamelessly jungle-leaning interpretation of “What Does Your Soul Look Like.” The mix works fine on its own, but when lumped in with the rest of the disc, it’s identifiable as the doomed sore thumb of the batch. A revised “Midnight in a Perfect World” finds Blackalicious alum Gift of Gab dropping acapella spoken word interludes in between sinister, jittery song fragments. The gem of the package, however, is the live 12-minute escapade concluding disc 2. It’s always fun to hear a crowd’s reaction to a Shadow set. It’s also fun to hear dude utterly dismantle the ones-and-twos, which he does curiously little of on his albums.

DJ Shadow - Excessive Ephemera (flac 358mb)

01 Best Foot Forward (Alternate Version) 1:16
02 Building Steam With A Grain Of Salt (Alternate Take Without Overdubs) 6:43
03 The Number Song (Cut Chemist Party Mix) 5:14
04 Changeling (Original Demo Excerpt) 1:00
05 Stem (Cops 'N' Robbers Mix) 3:48
06 Soup (Single Version) 0:44
07 Red Bus Needs To Leave 2:45
08 Mutual Slump (Alternate Take Without Overdubs) 4:21
09 Organ Donor (Extended Overhaul) 4:29
10 Why Hip Hop Sucks In '96 (Alternate Take) 0:54
11 Midnight In A Perfect World (Gab Mix) 4:55
12 Napalm Brain (Original Demo Beat) 0:35
13 What Does Your Soul Look Like (Peshay Remix) 9:24
14 Live In Oxford, England Oct. 30 1997 12:35

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You won't find "The DJ Shadow Remix Project" at Best Buy, Target, Amazon.com or anywhere else. In fact technically you can't "buy" this album at all - for a limited time Shadow is including a copy of the album free with the purchase of any +other+ album in his store. The creation of the album itself was equally non-traditional, as Shadow's website solicited remixes of his mixes from the online community, and the best of the best were compiled into this single disc. Here's what Shadow had to say about it:

"I love this CD, more than I ever dreamed I would. I love the lo-fi basement aesthetic of economic's vision, the sophisticated sheen of Randomatik's "Scatterbrain" mix, the grit and swagger of Irn Mnky. In many cases, new life has been breathed into songs I had long-since resigned to the past, and made them fresh again. You WILL hear these mixes in future shows, and that's the strongest endorsement I can give as a DJ. From one artist to another, thank you for inspiring me."

DJ Shadow - The Remix Project (flac 462mb)

01 Shadow Propaganda Mix (Somepling) 0:57
02 Building Steam With A Grain Of Salt (NiT GriT Mix) 3:19
03 Stem (Blank Image Mix) 5:22
04 Walkie Talkie (Irn Mnky "Beat Down" Mix) 4:13
05 What Does Your Soul Look Like? Part 2 (economics Version) 7:39
06 Broken Levee II (Primus Luta Version) 3:07
07 This Time (suonho "Now Is The Time" Mix) 4:00
08 Midnight In A Perfect World (FUSO Mix) 3:03
09 What Does Look Like Your Soul (Benjamin One Mix) 4:13
10 Mongrel Meets His Maker (Sonotech Mix) 3:52
11 Halfway Home (Awkward Mix) 4:51
12 Fixed Income (Cherenkov Riddim Mix) 4:54
13 Scatterbrain (Randomatik Blast Mix) 4:07
14 Shadow Megamix (Sovereign Universalist) 4:11
15 Building Steam With A Grain Of Salt (Ruby My Dear Mix) 5:24
16 Blood On The Motorway (Coalition Of The Aware "SHDW" Mix) 2:17
17 Stem (Le Couturier Version) 3:59

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