Now Approaching Midnight!

Autumn: nights are a’creeping in, temperature has dropped a little, leaves are a’falling and the hedgehogs are a’hibernating. I like Autumn but it does call for a recalibration of your soul every year.

Obviously a recalibration that fundamental requires a wholly holy soundtrack. Ladies and gentlemen I commend DJ Shadow Endtroducing to you.

---

Nudged towards the whole Mo’Wax scene by a far hipper friend I picked up on Endtroducing early doors. It made perfect sense to me as a natural progression from the Beastie Boys, towards a less-frantic more atmospheric take on turntablism, sampling and hip-hop, especially in light of the whole Bristolian trip-hop thang*.

Sure the tracks on Endtroducing were woven together from a ton of, mostly obscure, samples, but the LP did not use them in the same staccato, concussive, ultimately bonkers way as 3 Feet High And Rising or Paul’s Boutique did. DJ Shadow always seemed much more of a composer to my tired old ears, his work more mature, more complete, more realised^.

I still listen to it a lot.

---

First thing’s first DJ Shadow knits Endtroducing together using snippets of found dialogue and several short instrumental ‘Transmissions’, all are good and all work. The first tune proper is the rather gorgeous ‘Building Steam With A Grain Of Salt’, which boasts a lilting piano line and a vocal sample about creativity and teaching. DJ Shadow then gives us a lesson on how sampled percussion techniques can thrill, it is clever as hell and markedly different from anything I’d heard before**.

Just to jolt us from ambient complacency we get slapped upside our heads by ‘The Number Song’ which drives hard, deliberately scotching the mood and stopping Endtroducing from being too coffee table, too safe an album; it samples Metallica’s ‘Orion’. When the following track ‘Changeling’ takes us full chilled Ibiza, you relax into it, conscious that the mood could shatter, or charge up at any point; a trick the more abrasive ‘Mutual Slump’ pulls off later on by being chilled as well, the overall affect is decidedly 3D.

There is undeniably something wistful, something deep about all the major cuts on the album. I have heard Endtroducing described as a spiritual LP and I wouldn’t disagree. There is a rare beauty in tracks like ‘Transmission 2’, a sense of the ephemeral that is precious.

Which is not to say this is a remotely po-faced album, another favourite track of mine is the brilliantly titled ‘Why Hip Hop Sucks in ’96’. Lasting all of 43 seconds, the sampled voice tells us ‘It’s the money …’ over a decidedly Warren G-esque noise.

There are a whole fistful of good tracks here but my favourite one of all is ‘Midnight In A Perfect World’ which over the course of 5 minutes manages both to lull and excite the listener. The lush melodies evoke a leisurely-paced evening, into which DJ Shadow teasingly cuts a sample of someone rapping ‘now approaching midnight!’^^, letting a tiny bit of the sample show at a time. It sounds both diamond-tooled and organically grown simultaneously. It is truly great.

Other excellent parts include the none-more-organy ‘Organ Donor’ and the revelatory tunescape of ‘Stem/Long Stem’, which again does things with beats and timings that I’d not heard done before against another gentle backdrop, ratcheting up the tension.

I have dealt with ‘What Does Your Soul Look Like’ previously and we get parts 4 and 1 here, which is great, although call me a contrarian but parts 2 and 3 are my favourite. Them’s the breaks, as we DJ’s say.

---

Endtroducing still packs quite a spiritual punch for me, it sets and resets my seasonally adjusted mood. More than that though, I keep finding new layers and ideas in the music, new skeins to follow to their conclusions. I do love an album that you can hear new things in 26 years after you bought, it’s good value for money if nothing else.

I’ll end it there as we are rapidly approaching … Midnight!

1158 Down.

*as beautifully shown by those two Headz box sets Mo’Wax released back then that I couldn’t afford; still can’t.

^or as a genius once wrote:

Now there’d been plenty of sample jockeys before DJ Shadow (Josh Davis to his mum), rode into town, but no-one had heard anything quite like his work before. Where DJ Shadow was unique was in the way he built his music from such a vast number of samples, slicing them into tiny pieces – often using only a note or two from one track, rather than just lumping it into the hip-hop pot whole; excuse me if I lose you with all this technical muso terminology. The end result being a very new, more creative, way of making music, rather than the more familiar cutting and pasting DJ’s had been using up to that point. Which is all well and good but you need someone with a real sense of song structure, dynamics, flow and musicality if its to sound like music at all – Mr Davis had all that in spades and on an LP basis that was what made Endtroducing so knock-out.

**anything I’d heard before that wasn’t DJ Shadow, I’d been given a tape of his early stuff before buying this LP.

^I wondered if it was from Ice-T’s ‘Midnight’ or ‘6’N A Mornin”.