Endtroducing at 30: DJ Shadow's sampler argument still holds

Thirty years on, Endtroducing..... still plays like a case being made. DJ Shadow's debut is instrumental, has no rappers or singers on it, and runs notably slower than the hip-hop it came out beside in 1996. All of that reads as a decision now, and the thirtieth anniversary, a reissue campaign under the name A Lifetime of Vinyl Culture with a tour attached, is the reason to hear it again.

Shadow is Joshua Paul Davis, out of Davis, California, where he was cutting up samples on a four-track in high school and taking notes from Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. He DJ'd at the campus station KDVS, and James Lavelle signed 'In/Flux' to Mo' Wax in 1993. The British press needed a name for records like that and the Bristol ones, and in June 1994 it settled on trip hop, with 'In/Flux' as the record the name got pinned to. There were singles, a Solesides label with Blackalicious and Lyrics Born, scratches on a Massive Attack remix, and a reputation in Britain well before there was an album.

He started the album in the summer of 1994 and got about halfway before Mo' Wax put the material out as singles instead. 'In/Flux', 'Lost and Found' (a double A-side with DJ Krush) and 'What Does Your Soul Look Like' came to thirty-two and a half minutes that were meant to be his first album. He began again. The gear was an Akai MPC60, two turntables, and a Pro Tools rig borrowed from a visiting Dan 'The Automator' Nakamura. It took around two years, done in stretches around school, a move and touring, and it left no master tape and no stems. Shadow later found the original MPC and its floppy discs and rebuilt the songs from the samples over six months.

The album opens with 'Best Foot Forward', a doorway, and 'Building Steam With A Grain Of Salt' walks through it: drums doing the arguing, samples doing the melody, the human voice arriving only in fragments. It is a headphone record, intimate, not club-facing, and it keeps circling a suburban sort of loneliness with no singer to name it. Shadow's position was that a song can carry emotion with no voice on it, and Endtroducing is the evidence.

The pacing is long pieces against short ones. 'Changeling' is one of the long ones and carries the first 'Transmission' interlude out on its tail. 'Stem/Long Stem' is two ideas under one title and became a chart single; 'Midnight In A Perfect World' was the other, and its beginnings go back to late 1993 or early 1994, older than the sessions that finished the record. The forty-three seconds of 'Why Hip Hop Sucks In '96' is the album's one piece of dated graffiti, a title aimed at a year that has since passed. 'What Does Your Soul Look Like (Part 1 - Blue Sky Revisit)' closes it, and the title is honest: he had asked that question on a single already, and here it comes back around with two more years of digging behind it.

It is for anyone who arrived through the records being sampled and anyone who arrived later, through the producers who spent a decade chasing this. It sits beside Public Enemy's collages, beside the Bristol records it got bundled with, beside the Mo' Wax catalogue it helped define. Put it on late, on headphones. A car advert borrowed 'Building Steam With A Grain Of Salt' in 2014, which is roughly what happens to music this private once it turns out to be this good. Anyone who needs a chorus will be restless inside 'Changeling'.

The flaw is where the method asks more of the material than it has. 'Napalm Brain/Scatter Brain' is the longest thing here and lets its second half coast on the first half's credit. The three 'Transmission' interludes interrupt more than they connect. And the campaign itself is a name so far: nothing about what is in A Lifetime of Vinyl Culture, how it is cut or what is added, has been announced, so nobody holding the 1996 pressing has a reason to move yet.

That is a small complaint about the packaging of a record nothing has beaten in thirty years. The praise is for the thing itself: this quiet, this dense, assembled entirely from other people's records, and it still sounds like nobody else's. The sampler-as-instrument argument was won here. He rebuilt it from the samples once, by hand, in order to hear it again. It holds.

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