Endtroducing..... (1996)

Endtroducing..... is the debut studio album by American music producer DJ Shadow, released on September 16, 1996, by Mo' Wax. It is an instrumental hip hop work composed almost entirely of samples from vinyl records. DJ Shadow produced Endtroducing over two years, using an Akai MPC60 MKII sampler and little other equipment. He edited and layered samples to create new tracks of varying moods and tempos.

In the United Kingdom, where DJ Shadow had already established himself as a rising act, Endtroducing received praise from music journalists at the time of its release, and reached the top 20 of the UK Albums Chart. It was certified gold by the British Phonographic Industry. Mo' Wax issued four singles from the album, including the chart hits "Midnight in a Perfect World" and "Stem". It took considerably longer for Endtroducing to find success in the United States. After promoting the album and returning to his hometown of Davis, California, DJ Shadow devoted his time to creating new music. During this period, interest in Endtroducing began to build among the American music press, and it peaked at number 37 on the US Billboard Heatseekers Albums chart.

Endtroducing was ranked highly on various lists of the best albums of 1996, and has been acclaimed by critics as one of the greatest albums of the 1990s. It is considered a landmark recording in instrumental hip hop, with DJ Shadow's sampling techniques and arrangements leaving a lasting influence. In 2020, Rolling Stone magazine ranked Endtroducing 329th on its list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.

Background

As a high school student, DJ Shadow experimented with creating music from samples using a four-track recorder, inspired by sample-based music such as It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988) by the hip hop group Public Enemy. He began his music career in 1989 as a disc jockey for the University of California, Davis campus radio station KDVS. His KDVS work impressed A&R representative Dave "Funken" Klein, who signed him to the Hollywood Basic label to produce music and remixes. DJ Shadow's output for Hollywood Basic, including the 1993 single "Entropy" and his work with the SoleSides crew, brought him to the attention of English musician James Lavelle, who signed DJ Shadow to his Mo' Wax label.

DJ Shadow's first two singles for Mo' Wax, "In/Flux" (1993) and "Lost and Found (S.F.L.)" (1994), utilized samples from "used-bin" vinyl records, blending elements of hip hop, funk, soul, jazz, rock, and ambient music. The singles were acclaimed by the British music press, and soon DJ Shadow and other Mo' Wax artists came to be viewed as leading practitioners of a nascent genre that the press termed "trip hop" – a name coined by Mixmag journalist Andy Pemberton in June 1994 to describe "In/Flux" and similar tracks being played in London clubs. In the summer of 1994, DJ Shadow started producing his first album. He completed around half of the record, but Mo' Wax opted to instead issue the finished music as a single – "What Does Your Soul Look Like" – the following year. As a result, DJ Shadow began work on his debut album anew. He was intent on capturing the same feel of his three Mo' Wax singles, and chose the title Endtroducing..... for the album as "it signified the fourth and final chapter in a series of pieces that I was doing for Mo' Wax with a certain sound, a certain tone, a certain atmosphere."

Production

DJ Shadow began production on Endtroducing in 1994 in his California apartment, before moving to the Glue Factory, the San Francisco home studio of his colleague Dan the Automator. Shadow strove to create an entirely sample-based album. His setup was minimal, with only three main pieces of equipment: an Akai MPC60 MKII sampler, a Technics SL-1200 turntable and an Alesis ADAT tape recorder. He used the MPC60 MKII for almost all composition. DJ Shadow bought it in 1992 at the suggestion of DJ Stretch Armstrong, who recommended it as a more advanced alternative to the "industry standard" sampler at the time, the E-mu SP-1200; according to DJ Shadow, the SP-1200 "had been around for like four years, the sound was well established, and it had some real audio limitations in terms of the bit rate and stuff".

DJ Shadow sampled vinyl albums and singles accumulated from his trips to Rare Records, a record shop in his native Sacramento, where he spent several hours each day searching for music. His routine is depicted in the 2001 documentary film Scratch. The Endtroducing album cover is a photograph taken at Rare Records by B Plus, showing producer Chief Xcel and rapper Lyrics Born (the latter wearing a wig), who like DJ Shadow were members of the SoleSides collective. ABB Records founder Beni B (wearing a baseball cap) is also seen in the full version of the photograph, which appears in the album's liner notes.