Since his 1996 debut, Endtroducing revolutionised – and legitimised – the notion of sample-based instrumental hip-hop production, DJ Shadow has been one of the world’s most celebrated crate-digging creatives. A singular talent, DJ Shadow’s work proved that those dusty old records buried at the back of the record store shelf, or in your dad’s tatty old box, could just contain the raw materials of something new, and perhaps something extraordinary.
Sampling has, of course, moved on quite a bit since those foundational, vinyl-oriented days, but while there’s a wealth of cloud-synchronised platforms now offering you ready-to-go samples, for the purists it’s the artistry of corralling what you’d extracted with a classic Akai MPC that they still regard as ‘proper’ sampling.
Here at MusicRadar, we’ve maintained a good relationship with DJ Shadow, real name Josh Davis, across the years, speaking to him at various points across the last decade. Most recently we caught up with Josh in 2023 when he was creating his seventh LP, Action Adventure. In the conversation with Matt Mullen, he shared why – for him at least – that purist, MPC-oriented mindset had been consigned to history…
“It’s not so much about what you’re using or where you’re taking it from, but more the ideas that you’re adding on to it,” DJ Shadow told us. “It’s about the way it’s being used and the way it’s being manipulated. The ideas, more than ever, are what drives interesting music for me.”
His rejection of the MPC was part due to the fact that Josh had long-since exhausted the abilities of the Akai workhorse;
“The last project I did that was very MPC-intensive was my second album, The Private Press,” Josh told us. “I had two or three MIDI’d together, and it was very much like, ‘on this record, I’m going to do everything that can possibly be done on the MPC’. After that project, I was really keen to make music in other ways, but it really did take some time.
Josh continued; “Think back twenty years, and even fifteen years, if you updated your computer, you had to go back and update every third-party plugin, every little piece of outboard gear that was USB-powered, nothing ever spoke to each other correctly. It was really a nightmare. That’s what I hate about gear, at a certain point, is when it gets in the way of the creative flow. It seemed like every time I sat down to make music, some plugin was out of date. It was this constant process of chasing your tail.
“So I think around 2008, I said alright, I’ve had it, I’m gonna go and get the newest MPC and go back to doing it that way. I lasted about a day and a half. When you know what the possibilities are, and then you try to go back in time to something that’s constrictive, it just doesn’t work. Ever since that experiment about fifteen years ago, I just said nope, I’m gonna stick with it. Around 2012 was when I finally decided, okay, I’ve heard about this Ableton [Live], I’m gonna sit down and read the manual front-to-back. Everybody’s mind works differently, but to me Ableton solved so many issues about my workflow and the way I think about music.”
While Davis now lets the ideas drive the process, and uses Ableton Live, and other more modern tech, to realise it, he did share that back in the early days, the quest to prove that sampling was an art form was a genuine motivator;
“I didn’t want to limit myself to only samples anymore. At the time when I was starting out in the ‘90s, I was eager to demonstrate that samples were a legitimate form of making music. I wanted to articulate that in as many ways as I could. But I also knew that at some point I wanted to get into recording live instruments.”
You can read our full 2023 interview with DJ Shadow here, and an older interview we conducted with him from 2016 here.
