Endtroducing.....

Endtroducing..... is the debut studio album by American hip hop artist DJ Shadow. It was released on November 19, 1996 by Mo' Wax Records. The album was conceived as an effort by Shadow to make an album completely based around sampling.^[1] It is structured almost entirely out of sampled elements from genres ranging from hip hop, jazz, funk, psychedelia, as well as samples from films and interviews. All sampling on the album was done on an Akai MPC60 MKII sampler.^[1]

Background

DJ Shadow released Endtroducing..... when he was 24 years old. Frequenting record stores to find music, he would often bring a small Fisher Price battery operated record player to listen to the records in the store. Obscure albums are of interest, while DJ Shadow tries to avoid obvious material in his recordings.

Structure and release

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, although the liner notes of the outtakes album Excessive Ephemera note that vocals were contributed in the studio by Lyrics Born and Gift of Gab.

In 2005 DJ Shadow released a "Deluxe Edition" of the album with a second disc containing demos, alternate versions of original tracks, tracks exclusive to CD singles, and a vintage live set recorded on October 30, 1997.

The album's front cover depicts Solesides members Chief Xcel (left) and Lyrics Born (right) in Records, a record store at 710 K Street in Sacramento, California.^[2] The K Street location of Records closed in December 2006, and has since relocated to the former Tower Video location at the corner of Broadway and South Land Park Drive. The back cover features Beni B (owner of ABB records) and a blind cat belonging to the shop owner. ^[3]

14 years after the initial release, Building Steam With A Grain Of Salt found new life when it was featured in the 2010 video game Splinter Cell: Conviction.

Reception

Upon its release, Endtroducing..... received almost unanimously positive reviews. Spin awarded the album a score of nine out of ten, with reviewer Sian Michel writing that Endtroducing..... "...layers slinky break-beats with sampled sounds--anything from church bells to War of the Worlds and, egad, Tears for Fears....a cosmic-chamber feel complete with choruses of fallen angels, plucked harps, Mellotron, and cello."^[14] Jon Wiederhorn of Entertainment Weekly was full of praise for the album, providing it with a grade of A-, and went on to say of Endtroducing..... that "...like a surreal film soundtrack on which jazz, classical, and jungle fragments are artfully blended with turntable tricks and dialogue snippets, Endtroducing... takes hip-hop into the next dimension."^[6] Further praise came from Rolling Stone who awarded the album four stars out of five, saying of Endtroducing..... that "The DJ built songs out of layer upon layer of sampled instruments and other sound fragments, most of which he processed, looped and re-arranged far beyond recognition....funky rhythms that never sound like they've been cut and pasted together."^[10] Q magazine also responded favorably, writing in a four out of five stars review that "Shadow's brief is to develop a totally sample-based idiom, weaving a cinematically broad spectrum so deftly layered that the sampling-is-stealing argument falls flat."^[13] Giving Endtroducing..... five stars out of five, Alternative Press said of the album that it is "...an undeniable hip-hop masterpiece....DJ Shadow remembers that sampling is an art form."^[13] Uncut said of the album that "It's an elegy from a vinyl mausoleum, a sonic fiction assembled by a keen-eared archaeologist," awarding Endtroducing..... with four stars out of five.^[13] Robert Christgau, in a review of high praise, awarded the album a grade of A+, saying of Endtroducing..... that it is "...music and chaos and satire and self-mockery and music all at once."^[5] In an equally enthusiastic review, Melody Maker said that the album "...flips hip hop inside out all over again like a reversible glove, and again, and again, and each time it's sudden and new. I am, I confess, totally confounded by it. I hear a lot of good records, but very few impossible ones....You need this record. You are incomplete without it."^[13] The album is featured in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.

Legacy

In the years following the release of Endtroducing..... high praise has continued to be forthcoming. Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic gave the album five of five stars, saying that "...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." 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." Also in a review of the Endtroducing..... "Deluxe Edition" in 2005, PopMatters gave the album 10/10, and went on to say that "it is a uniquely evocative and intimate disc, a stridently personal statement masquerading as a genre-defining dissertation." Spin was also full of praise once again, stating that "This remains a stone classic, channeling Afrika Bambaataa's genre-splicing, DJ-booth mysticism into a fully realized studio epic..." In a review by Sal Cinquemani for Slant the album was given five out of five stars, saying that DJ Shadow had created "...an ominous and multi-textured masterpiece of hip-hop postmodernism." "A decade on," said Mojo, "DJ Shadow's affirmatory essay on record collecting as a creative endeavour has lost none of its grandeur," giving the album four out of five stars.

Accolades

(*) designates unordered lists.

Track listing

Notes:

• Some editions Combine "Changeling" with "Transmission 1", "Stem/Long Stem" with "Transmission 2" and "What Does Your Soul Look Like (Part 1 - Blue Sky Revisit)" with "Transmission 3" respectively^[26]
• The bonus disc was also released as the vinyl only set "Excessive Ephemera", limited to 1500 copies.^[27]

Personnel

• Josh Davis (DJ Shadow) - production, mix, engineering
• Lyrics Born - vocals - untitled track 6 & "Why Hip-Hop Sucks in '96"
• Gift of Gab - vocals - "Midnight in a Perfect World"

References