Endtroducing......
| Endtroducing...... | |
|---|---|
| File:Endtroducing-album-cover The cover of this album | |
| 📅 Released | 1996-09-16 |
| Language | English |
| 🏷️ Label | Mo' Wax |
Buy this album Endtroducing...... or listen to it on amazon
Endtroducing (officially known as Endtroducing......) is the debut album of DJ Shadow, released on September 16th, 1996. It holds the Guiness world record for being the first album to be fully made out of samples. This is true for the most part, though very small vocal pieces were done by friends of him. Otherwise, it does indeed hold the record.
Background
Joshua Paul Davis, the man behind DJ Shadow, started experimenting with sampling in high school. He began his career some time in 1989 as a Disc Jockey for the University of California. Record labels became interested in his abilities and Mo' Wax decided to sign him. After a few singles, DJ Shadow took 2 years to make what would be Endtroducing. He would spend most of his days in the basement of Rare Records, a music shop in his area, searching for music. Later on, he mentioned that he was experiencing self-doubt and depression, with the records not helping his mental state, as he called them the broken and forgotten dreams of many people.
When the album was released, Davis got such amounts of praise in the UK when he visited that, when he came to America, he experienced whiplash due to the fact it took longer to get recognition there.
Composition
The album consists of many samples from vinyl records found in Rare Records. Most of it is jazz, psychedelic music, funk, and similar genres. He also sampled a considerable amount of electronic and ambient music. There's also samples from films, with one prominent example being Prince of Darkness, which is sampled in all the "Transmission" interlude tracks. Some tracks go up to 7 or 9 minutes, and others are as short as 1 or 2 minutes.
Recording
DJ Shadow started recording the album in his apartment before moving the recording to the Glue Factory, the home of his friend Dan the Automator. He mainly used three pieces of equipment: an Akai MPC60 MKII sampler that could only hold 13 seconds of audio at once, his Technics SL-1200 turntable and an Alesis ADAPT tape recorder.
Track listing
- Best Foot Forward (0:46)
- Building Steam With A Grain of Salt (6:39)
- The Number Song (4:34)
- Changeling (7:16)
- Transmission 1 (0:35)
- What Does Your Soul Look Like, Pt. 4 (5:02)
- Untitled (0:24)
- Stem / Long Stem - Medley (7:47)
- Transmission 2 (1:29)
- Mutual Slump (4:00)
- Organ Doner (1:57)
- Why Hip-Hop Sucks In '96 (0:43)
- Midnight In A Perfect World (4:58)
- Napalm Brain / Scatter Brain - Medley (9:21)
- What Does Your Soul Look Like (Part 1) - Blue Sky Revisit (6:17)
- Transmission 3 (1:10)
