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Nick Bollinger samples the new release from DJ Shadow.
Identifying who it was that figured out old records could be the basis of new ones, is like arguing over who invented rock’n’roll. Still, if you are looking for landmarks in the evolution of sample-based music – records effectively made from the parts other records - there are a couple of albums that always rear their heads. One is DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing – the debut of the Californian deejay/producer Josh Davis, which has just passed its 20th anniversary.
In theory it is something of a departure. Read about its making and you’ll learn that it involved Davis putting aside the turntables and MPC sampler that had been the chief tools of Endtroducing and most of his subsequent work, in favour of Ableton Live, a software sequencer with instrument sounds, designed for live performance.
When you consider that Endtroducing was noted in the Guinness Book of Records as the First Completely Sampled Album, it’s easier to appreciate what a different approach Davis has taken in a track like ‘California’: a piece of moody electronica, which cycles through a series of chords while a synthesiser tone sinks ominously over a brittle machine-driven drum pattern. The only thing in that track I assume comes from Davis’s legendary library of 60,000 albums is the voice that occasionally intones the name of his home state.
Not that Shadow couldn’t be just as abstract as this when he was cutting up old vinyl. In fact, there are tracks here that might be more traditional than anything on Endtroducing. Like ‘The Sideshow’ – featuring little-known rapper Ernie Fresh – in which Davis’s turntables seem once again to be the main instrument. Rappers and singers have never been a huge component of Shadow’s records, and they are not really this time either, though one of the album’s liveliest moments is a cameo on ‘Nobody Speak’ from rappers Killer Mike and El-P of Run The Jewels.
One intriguing collaboration is ‘Bergschrund’, the single track here to feature the German electronic composer Nils Frahm. The two meet in a place that is perhaps closer to Frahm’s territory than Shadow’s, but breaks new ground for both. But mostly The Mountain Will Fall is moodier and darker than that; the palette is established right from the beginning with the album’s glacial title track and culminates in a couple of seriously elegiac pieces that come towards the album’s conclusion, with the ominous titles ‘Ghost Town’ and ‘Suicide Pact’.
DJ Shadow’s The Mountain Will Fall doesn’t have the kind of epochal resonance Endtroducing did, nor does it have its immediate appeal, or even its cohesiveness. Still it shows Josh Davis as a music maker who remains vital and engaged, whatever tools he might be using.
Songs featured: The Mountain Will Fall, California, Suicide Pact, The Sideshow, Nobody Speak.
The Mountain Will Fall is available on Mass Appeal Records.
