The dream of the ’90s is alive in the record crates of Nick Catchdubs and Mr. Ducker. Check out a complete tracklisting and more details over at Mishka, or explore all things Radio Friendly Unit Shifter at the duo’s time capsule of a Tumblr page.
Tag: DJ Shadow
Photos by Jimmy Fontaine
Words by Andrew Parks
A sealed box of demos and cassettes sits in the corner of DJ Shadow‘s tour bus. The 39-year-old producer recently hit Calgary’s Recordland shop for an after-hours dig and hauled in everything from guy-with-a-guitar throwaways to alt-rock casualties that sound a lot like the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Questionable taste aside, the tapes are building blocks, the stuff sampledelic masterpieces are made of—like Shadow’s own seminal Endtroducing… LP.
“It’s just a personal preference,” says Shadow, born Josh Davis, of his antiquated method for consuming music. “When I download music, I don’t feel compelled to judge it on any other basis than ‘Is this the greatest thing I’ve ever heard or not?’ When I listen to one of these tapes, it’s like, ‘Wow, this is a total left turn,’ or ‘Who were these guys?’”
It’s telling that the first record he ever purchased, three decades ago, was “The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel,” a single that drops Blondie, Chic and Queen amid block-party breaks and a seven-minute live mix. Each Shadow album since Endtroducing… has been both thrilling and baffling—whether it’s the divisive bits of Bay Area rap on The Outsider or the brash modern-rock bait of “Warning Call” (featuring Tom Vek) from the producer’s long-awaited new LP, The Less You Know, the Better.
“All of the music I’ve ever been drawn to has been really immediate and raw,” he explains. “At the same time, it’s usually well-arranged and conceived. That doesn’t mean hiring a 50-piece orchestra and all of that pretentious shit. It could be one person and a guitar and amazing in the same way.”
In the following rare interview—an extended version of the one in our enhanced iPad/Web edition—Shadow helps us make sense of it all, from his painstaking creative process to the one record you won’t believe he owns (and loves)…
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[Boiler Room] We’ll be sharing an extended version of our recent DJ Shadow interview (flip to the original here) later this week. For now, here’s a rare 30-minute mix from the legendary turntablist…
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Look out for an extensive DJ Shadow interview in the next issue of self-titled. His long-awaited new album, The Less You Know, the Better, drops on September 27th through Verve.
The Artist/Album: DJ Shadow, The Private Press (MCA, 2002)
The Reason(s) We Can’t Stop Listening: While we’re not about to deny the stone-cold-classic status of DJ Shadow’s debut album (1996′s Endtroducing…), its long-awaited follow-up is just as much of a sample-happy journey through whatever Josh Davis happened to feel like sharing from his hangar-sized record collection today. If anything, the iconic producer is at the top of his game here, the very definition of the “bad ass, motherfucking DJ” on “Walkie Talkie.”
The Private Press also includes some of Shadow’s tensest tracks, the kind of cuts that make you stop in your tracks and think about something other than trunk-thumping beats and bad ass breaks. Like our own mortality, which is hinted at in such haunting, career-high productions as “Six Days” and “Blood On the Motorway.”
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Words and Photos by Andrew Parks
If you could make it past the kill joy closing of Fleet Foxes—seriously dudes, no one cares that Dizzee Rascal dissed your MOR folk music a few years ago—the second day of Pitchfork’s annual festival was rife with artists reinventing their studio sound for the stage. That goes for everything from the feel-good Grateful Dead-isms of Woods to the muscular synth-pop of Cold Cave, which finally saw frontman Wesley Eisold relishing his frontman role with the same sense of confidence and pressure-cooked aggression that he once had in the hardcore band Give Up the Ghost.
The only letdown of the day? Watching DJ Shadow struggle to project the live visuals of his ambitious “Shadowsphere” show in broad daylight. Some advice for Pitchfork’s promoters: don’t make a sample-chopping, crowd-pleasing legend in a Death Star globe play before a band that’s best heard in coffee shops and the main stage of Bonnaroo.
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Mophono had us at Endtroducing; as in the flawless DJ Shadow full-length that’s name-dropped in the beat conductor’s bio. Sure enough, “Cut Form Into Part One and Two” (taken from his new album, Cut Form Crush) is heavy on the shape-shifting synths and dusty drum loops. You can catch the rest of Mophono’s record—including a live, in-studio collaboration with Flying Lotus—on February 15 through his own CB Records imprint.
[Photo by thoughtcrimes]
Okay, so the “Shadowsphere” setup of DJ Shadow‘s fall tour is a little gimmicky—a Death Star one minute, a basket/base/soccer ball the next—but it’s also a reminder of where the iconic producer comes from. And that is the long-lost era of crate digging and early rave culture that gave us dizzying cut-and-paste compositions, synapse-locked visuals, and our personal favorite, “chill-out rooms.”
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