10/10
Favorite Track: "Building Steam with a Grain of Salt" Least Favorite: "Untitled"
I miss old trip-hop, specifically the sampling aspect. The music felt so painfully realized, a collection of music from the past being creatively re-written to form cohesion. We’ve seen some people master since ‘Endtroducing…’, Madlib, The Avalanches, the late J-Dilla. But to forget the mastermind that pioneered it, we’d have to lose one of sampling’s greatest masterminds.Endtroducing… is more or less the story of DJ Shadow, (the rest of his career is mainly overlooked excluding ‘Nobody Speak’ and some song for F&F) which is disappointing, but not surprising. Shadow struck gold on his debut, making a surreal and transcendent experience that is definitely in my top 5 stoned albums. All his samples are so perfectly placed, the eerie pianos from Jeremy Storch, the humming bass from Metallica (no not that one), or the rounded synths from Pekka Pohjola, fits so cleanly. All of these, parted by spacey and outlandish transmissions that add so perfectly to the distressing vibe of the album. Sampling itself was shifted entirely by this album. Immediately it was hailed as an instant classic, winning heavy praise that thrust it to a legendary status. Dj Shadow became an icon, almost a piece of history despite his career. The album itself sings so much of souls, the harshness of one. He chooses to rip open the body to see what it truly is made of, his question ‘what does your soul look like’, feels like a threat rather than an inquiry. But it doesn’t feel wrong at heart, it’s a yearning for answers we feel, along with the balance one feels when discovering. We never get to see our souls in reality. All we see is a fade to black that ends our book, the back covering enveloping the final pages. Rather, we feel our souls, connecting quite gratingly with them. Through experiences, we gain a sense of life, life’s fleeting awakening in ourselves, the true way of discovering our souls. Followed by the reimagining of a person after seeing it and feeling the eclipse of reality. The bliss of discovering is wildly transcendent and alien, yet it feels so normal, so peaceful when locked into Endtroducing…