Electronic Sound July 2015 (Regular Edition) | Page 9

ENDTRODUCING.....
THE 1996 REVIEW
Electronic Sound editor Push was one of
the first UK journalists to stick his neck out and proclaim
‘Endtroducing.....’ the masterpiece that it is. "Unique, uncompromising,
unsurpassable,” he said. Here's that review, first published in Muzik
magazine a month upfront of the album's November 1996 release
Stuttered beats, fluttered beats. Scratching harder and faster than the
caretaker’s cat at the local fleapit. Pianos that tease and prick, b-lines that
cajole and haul. Feedback and dub. An angel with broken wings sobbing
pitifully in the distance. A saxophone tuned by the devil himself. Superfly
speak and loopy luna talk. Backwards stuff, sideways stuff, inside out and
halfway up the third flagpole from the
left stuff.
and you could see Bambaataa’s ‘Planet Rock’ as a
perfect example of what I’m talking about. Somebody
interpreting Kraftwerk in their own peculiar way and,
lo and behold, multiple genres are spawned. I was
here at the studio just last week with one of the
Liquid Amber artists, Bleep Bloop, and I was playing
him Mantronix and telling him how this was my
biggest influence. And he was hearing it and saying,
‘Wow, that’s pretty radical for something that’s 30
years old’.”
It’s notable that the artists featured on Liquid Amber
are primarily from the San Francisco Bay Area. Do you
feel your home ground has been unfairly overlooked
by the music industry?
“There’s a lot of people here, but we’ll never be LA.
The music industry isn’t based here. It’s based in
London, New York, LA, so San Francisco will always
have this ‘also ran’ status. It has done for years. That
doesn’t really matter to me, but maybe it makes
sense that music from the Bay Area speaks a little
more closely to me when I listen deeply to it.
“Actually, that’s something else I found interesting
about the sets I was putting together. My sets have
been always about 30 per cent recognisable and
70 per cent off the wall and strange. Sometimes
in the process of discovering artists, you’re never
sure where they’re from – Germany, Russia, Korea,
whatever – but it slowly became clearer to me that I
was gravitating towards music that was from this area.
Most times, I discovered that afterwards. I had no
idea where Bleep Bloop was from. He’d been putting
music out on a German label and while I assumed he
probably wasn’t German, I had no idea he was from
about an hour from where I lived. The same with
G Jones, the same with so many of the records I’ve
dropped in sets these last few years.
“Liquid Amber is not about some Bay Area, flagwaving exercise, though. It’s just that, to date, all
of the artists happened to be from here. And I
don’t think there’s anything wrong with that either.
Logistically, we’re all within a short drive from each
other and you don’t have to worry about time zones
or language barriers or any of that. But I am ready to
put out something by someone I met from Virginia,
so I’m open to sounds from anywhere.”
There’s a lot of talk about the gentrification of San

The world of DJ Shadow is way out west. Further out west than Bristol,
that’s for sure. Remember trip hop? Good. Congratulations. Now forget it.
Forget all the usual reference points that get rolled out for most Mo’
Wax releases too. Shadow is from the San Francisco/Oakland Bay Area
and, maybe sometimes without even realising it, he has soaked up the
influences of California’s greatest icons from years long gone. The looseboned funk of Sly Stone and the weight of War. The twisted blues of Janis
Joplin and the bugged-out bravado of Country Joe McDonald. You can’t
sing along to many of Shadow’s tracks, but the melancholic popadelic
sensibility of the Walker Brothers is occasionally there too, deep in the mix.
Don’t be misled, though. ‘Endtroducing.....’ is very much a hip hop release.
Entirely made up of samples, snatches of other people’s tracks, the whole
concept of Shadow’s debut album harks back to the earlier days of the
genre. The days when Kool Herc and DJ Flowers would just set up and let
rip down at the park, the days when the guy cutting and scratching was the
real star and the rapper was merely one of his mates. A mate whose legs
were too thin to be given the far more important job of pedalling the bike
which kept the DJ’s generator going.
And despite these blasts about the past, ‘Endtroducing.....’ is also very
much an album of the 1990s. Sometimes beyond. Sometimes so far beyond
that we’re not actually talking about the 1990s anymore but the 2090s.
‘Building Steam With A Grain of Salt’, for instance, would be the perfect
theme tune for a remake of ‘The Good, The Bad And The Ugly’, with
Robocop cast as The Man With No Name. ‘Stem/Long Stem’ is meanwhile
best described as a futuristic heavy metal track. You’d better practise a few
air turntable solos.
‘The Number Song’ and ‘Napalm Brain/Scatter Brain’ are equally tough. The
former sounds rather like The Chemical Brothers so off their faces they’ve
replaced their styluses with sledgehammers. The latter starts as a rumbling
dope cut before switching to a mad frenzy of military snares by way of
funky guitar riffs so slow they’re painful. In stark contrast, the one-fingered
piano playing and truly heavenly vocals of ‘Midnight In A Perfect World’ will
fill your head with blissful thoughts. So will the first and fourth parts of
‘What Does Your Soul Look Like’.
Throughout all this, Shadow is ably assisted by The Automator, whose
credits include Kool Keith’s hilarious ‘Dr Octagon’ project. And though
nothing here can match the outrageous humour of the Kool Keith record,
there are still flashes of wonderfully dippy dizziness. Get a load of ‘Why Hip
Hop Sucks In ‘96’, a 40-second snapshot which closes with the words “It’s
the money”. Catch the insane backwoods boy who wants to play his little
buddy at checkers, while you’re at it.
‘Endtroducing.....’ is rounded off with a sample from David Lynch’s ‘Twin
Peaks’. Remember the episode where Agent Cooper dreams of a giant who
tells him “It’s happening again”? Good. Congratulations. Now forget that as
well. Because it sure as hell isn’t going to happen like this again.
Unique, uncompromising, unsurpassable. Buy, buy, buy.
PUSH