Endtroducing...

DJ Shadow — Josh Davis — made Endtroducing… almost entirely in Dan the Automator’s San Francisco home studio, the Glue Factory, on an Akai MPC60 II and a Technics SL-1200. The MPC60 is Roger Linn’s machine — the same machine family that Charnas’s whole Dilla Time argument is built around. Dan the Automator is the other half of Handsome Boy Modeling School. The physical space where this record was made is the same room that connects it to Prince Paul’s network, to Dilla’s tools, to the whole instrumental hip-hop lineage.

Guinness certified Endtroducing as the first album made entirely from samples. Reynolds’s description is precise in the best possible way: “Shadow’s music isn’t social, nor is it anti-social — it’s asocial: an aural sanctuary from the hurly-burly, music that hushes your soul.” That framing explains why the record sits as comfortably beside ambient and ambient-adjacent electronic music as it does beside hip-hop. This is the Mo Wax pressing, James Lavelle’s London label, which puts it in the same curatorial orbit as the UNKLE project Lavelle and Shadow would make together.