Electronic Sound July 2015 (Regular Edition) | Page 8

DJ SHADOW

“That style of beats is something I’ve been into my entire
career,” says Josh Davis, aka DJ Shadow, when I suggest to him
that the output of his Liquid Amber label, including his own
self-titled Nite School Klik EP, represents a quantum leap from
his recorded history thus far.
“When I grew up, I wasn’t able to afford drum machines,” he
continues. “So when I was first able to make a record, I was
using bits of vinyl and a four-track cassette recorder. The first
sampler I was able to get was the MPC. By my way of thinking,
if I bought a drum machine, well, that’s great, but then you
also need a keyboard and a mixing desk, whereas the MPC was
everything in one machine and you could do it all.”
Despite the relatively modest technical means by which it was
realised, DJ Shadow’s ‘Endtroducing.....’ album represented
a huge and significant statement about the state of music in
1996. It was a reproach to the dominance of hip hop as a rap
medium rather than its decreasingly avant garde backbeats. It
showed that sampling was just as valid a form of creating music
as that achieved on conventional instruments, involving the
same processes of decision making, sound assembly, dramatic
arcs, and so on.
Drawing on musics past and current and globally sourced, the
vast quilt of ‘Endtroducing.....’ suggested that this was the
medium in 1996; music had a vast, ignorable legacy and a
hectic, eclectic, worldwide present. To hope to make sense of
it all was a huge, vertiginous task involving the amassing of
thousands of records. It’s not surprising that many punters were
frightened by this prospect.
Over the years, in between various projects involving
soundtracking and DJing, Shadow has released three more
albums, most recently 2011’s ‘The Less You Know, The Better’,
which in their different ways confounded the expectations of
his fans while building on his reputation. Now he has founded
his own Liquid Amber label, home to a number of young
fellow San Francisco Bay Area artists, in which he scotches any
lingering suspicion that he is an artist happiest immersed in the
retro-crackle of old vinyl.
One of the most interesting Amber Liquid releases to date
is the awesome ‘Nice Nightmares’ on Nite School Klik’s
eponymous EP, which is Shadow himself in collaboration with
Santa Cruz bass producer G Jones. It hoves in formidably from
an unexpected angle, like a freshly constructed space station,
its off-kilter beats and faded, ancient hip hop tropes bouncing
and reverberating around gleaming corridors, bridges and
walkways. I ask Shadow what was the genesis of this decidedly
21st century project.

“The chain of events started happening when I was given the
opportunity to play sets of contemporary music, which is
something I hadn’t done since the UNKLE record came out.
Back then, I might play a drum ‘n’ bass record, a hip hop record,
or maybe even throw in an Oasis record! It was pretty free
form, but that’s how the Mo’ Wax nights used to go.
“So when I got the chance again, it took me back to that
mindset, and it felt so good to do that, to expose that side of
what I’m about. A lot of people think, incorrectly, that I’m a
purist, I’m only interested in vinyl, I’m obsessed with the past,
and that bemuses me. So this was a chance for me to play stuff
that really spoke to me – post-dubstep, footwork, whatever.”
The Liquid Amber output certainly sounds futuristic, rather than
a retro mesh. Have you taken on lots of new equipment?
“I started using Ableton in 2009, but only as a means to put a
show together,” says Shadow. “We did a tour called Live From
The Shadowsphere and in the R&D phase of putting the tour
together we determined that Ableton was the most effective
method of syncing the music and the visuals. But I still had
CDJs and a drum module, so I was still able to perform, there
was a bedrock of music underneath. Then in 2012, I decided
to go back to school and learn how to make a proper beat
on Ableton. It’s a piece of transformative technology, it has a
sound, and you can really do things in a way that you can’t do
any other way.”
Do you think it’s best to treat the latest technology as
a musical instrument, rather than as a labour-saving or
shortcutting device?
“Definitely. We’ve been working in largely 4/4 for going on 50
years now and sometimes you don’t have to rent out the most
extravagant studio in the world, get all the best pre-amps, the
best guitar pedals, to achieve something new. Sometimes it’s
as simple as imagining a rhythm played in a slightly different
way that causes all sorts of new things to happen. That’s what
constantly inspires me about beats and, from an A&R point
of view with the Liquid Amber label, I want to be thrown
off a bit, I want to people to come up with something that’s
slightly tilted. I’m not interested in someone just making this
cacophonous noise that no one has ever come up with before.
It has to have body and heft to it and something about it that’s
slightly different.
“Naturally, my mind has been preoccupied over the last year or
so with the Bambaataa tour [the Renegades Of Rhythm tour
with Cut Chemist, celebrating the work of Afrika Bambaataa]