Detailed item info | Track listing | 1. Best Foot Forward
2. Building Steam With a Grain of Salt
3. Number Song, The
4. Changeling / Transmission 1
5. What Does Your Soul Look Like (Part 4)
6. (Untitled)
7. Stem / Long Stem / Transmission 2
8. Mutual Slump
9. Organ Donor
10. Why Hip Hop Sucks in '96
11. Midnight in a Perfect World
12. Napalm Brain / Scatter Brain
13. What Does Your Soul Look Like (Part 1-Blue Sky Revisit) / Transmission 3
| | Details | | Producer: | DJ Shadow | | Distributor: | Fontana Distribution | | Recording type: | Studio | | Recording mode: | Stereo | | SPAR Code: | n/a |
| | Album notes | Recorded at The Glue Factory, San Francisco, California.
Though the sleeve notes of DJ Shadow's exhilarating long-playing debut speak of his devotion to "vinyl culture" and "sample-based music" (a guide of which is contained within), it's all just double-speak for hip-hop. Undoubtedly, this is the musical culture that lit up the life of young Cali-boy Josh Davis, inspiring him to construct these vocal-less, found-sound collages. Not the hip-hop that a dime-a-dozen MCs have turned into a cartoonish, excess-filled formula, but the hip-hop of such sonic anarchist producers as Afrika Bambaataa and The Bomb Squad. To put it mildly, DJ Shadow sides with the dope beats, not the bland blah-blah-blah.
Shadow's skills with a drum machine power ENDTRODUCING... as much as his innovative def-ness with a sampler--which says a lot for someone who's been called the Jimi Hendrix of sampling. The songs shift tempos in a blink, incorporating multiple time-signatures, and it's to Shadow's credit that he's as comfortable hinting at Elvin Jones' or Dave Grohl's rhythmic attacks as he is citing old faithfuls like Clyde Stubblefield. His wide array of samples color the album's beat-heavy text. Ethereal horns, ambient keyboards, orchestral strings, vocoder vocals, whole film scenes--each is made a part of the sweeping focus, part of a grand postmodern design.
| | Editorial reviews | Included in Rolling Stone's Essential Recordings of the 90's.
Rolling Stone (05/13/1999)
Ranked #15 in Spin Magazine's 90 Greatest Albums of the '90s.
Spin (09/01/1999)
Ranked #12 on Spin's list of the 20 Best Albums of '96.
Spin (01/01/1997)
Ranked #4 in the Village Voice's 1996 Pazz & Jop Critics' Poll.
Village Voice (02/25/1997)
Ranked #2 on Melody Maker's list of 1996's Albums Of The Year.
Melody Maker
Ranked #5 in NME's 1996 critics' poll.
NME
4 Stars (out of 5) - ...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...
Rolling Stone (01/23/1997)
9 (out of 10) - ...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...
Spin (01/01/1997)
4 Stars (out of 5) - ...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...
Q (11/01/1996)
Bloody Essential - ...it 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.
Melody Maker (09/14/1996)
Some consider...ENDTRODUCING... a broadcast from hip-hop's near future. But that notion ignores how much this disc reaffirms the music's creative roots....ENDTRODUCING is pretty damn good, with Shadow demonstrating an unerring ear for motif and texture, touching on everything from dub to funk to groove-jazz...
JazzTimes (04/01/1997)
...Unfolding lik 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. - Rating: A-
Entertainment Weekly (11/29/1996)
...Innovative arrangements and structures of sound are present here, reflecting a mind that is constantly summoning collage forms...
Rap Pages (12/01/1996)
...Shadow makes records the way Robert Rauschenberg made his combines: from scraps, pop artifacts, the things other people throw away....While some of his tracks float serenely on a cloud of jazzy phrasing and ambient textures, Shadow always lands on his beat...
Option (01/01/1997)
5 (out of 5) - ...an undeniable hip-hop masterpiece....DJ Shadow remembers that sampling is an art form.
Alternative Press (04/01/1997)
Included in Q Magazine's 90 Best Albums Of The 1990s.
Q (12/01/1999)
Some consider...ENDTRODUCING... a broadcast from hip-hop's near future. But that notion ignores how much this disc reaffirms the music's creative roots....ENDTRODUCING is pretty damn good, with Shadow demonstrating an unerring ear for motif and texture, touching on everything from dub to funk to groove-jazz...
JazzTimes (04/01/1997)
Bloody Essential - ...it 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.
Melody Maker (09/14/1996)
4 stars out of 5 - It's an elegy from a vinyl mausoleum, a sonic fiction assembled by a keen-eared archaeologist.
Uncut
4 stars out of 5 - A decade on, DJ Shadow's affirmatory essay on record collecting as a creative endeavour has lost none of its grandeur.
Mojo
One of the best hip-hop, yes hip-hop - records ever made.
Spin
An instrumental album entirely composed of samples and influenced by both prog rock and Public Enemy was, at the time, revolutionary....Still unmatched in its carefree invention.
Magnet
Ranked #18 in Mojo's 100 Modern Classics -- [The album] returned hip hop's focus from the MC to the music.
Mojo
[T]his remains a stone classic, channeling Afrika Bambaataa's genre-splicing, DJ-booth mysticism into a fully realized studio epic...
Spin
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