DJ Shadow: Endtroducing – Винил үлгілерінен құралған альбом

1996 studio album by DJ Shadow

Endtroducing is the debut studio album by American music producer DJ Shadow, released on September 16, 1996, by Mo' Wax. It is an instrumental hip hop work composed almost entirely of samples from vinyl records. DJ Shadow produced Endtroducing over two years, using an Akai MPC60 sampler and little other equipment. He edited and layered samples to create new tracks of varying moods and tempos. In the United Kingdom, where DJ Shadow had already established himself as a rising act, Endtroducing received praise from music journalists at the time of its release, and reached the top 20 of the UK Albums Chart. It was certified gold by the British Phonographic Industry. Mo' Wax issued four singles from the album, including the chart hits "Midnight in a Perfect World" and "Stem". It took considerably longer for Endtroducing to find success in the United States. After promoting the album and returning to his hometown of Davis, California, DJ Shadow devoted his time to creating new music. During this period, interest in Endtroducing began to build among the American music press, and it peaked at number 37 on the US Billboard Heatseekers Albums chart. Endtroducing was ranked highly on various lists of the best albums of 1996, and has been acclaimed by critics as one of the greatest albums of the 1990s. It is considered a landmark recording in instrumental hip hop, with DJ Shadow's sampling techniques and arrangements leaving a lasting influence. In 2020, Rolling Stone magazine ranked Endtroducing 329th on its list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.

As a high school student, DJ Shadow experimented with creating music from samples using a four track recorder, inspired by sample based music such as It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988) by the hip hop group Public Enemy. He began his music career in 1989 as a disc jockey for the University of California, Davis campus radio station KDVS. His KDVS work impressed A&R representative Dave "Funken" Klein, who signed him to the Hollywood Basic label to produce music and remixes. The singles were acclaimed by the British music press, and soon DJ Shadow and other Mo' Wax artists came to be viewed as leading practitioners of a nascent genre that the press termed "trip hop" – a name coined by Mixmag journalist Andy Pemberton in June 1994 to describe "In/Flux" and similar tracks being played in London clubs. In the summer of 1994, DJ Shadow started producing his first album. He completed around half of the record, but Mo' Wax opted to instead issue the finished music as a single – "What Does Your Soul Look Like" – the following year.

DJ Shadow began production on Endtroducing in 1994 in his California apartment, before moving to the Glue Factory, the San Francisco home studio of his colleague Dan the Automator. Shadow strove to create an entirely sample based album. DJ Shadow bought it in 1992 at the suggestion of DJ Stretch Armstrong, who recommended it as a more advanced alternative to the "industry standard" sampler at the time, the E mu SP 1200; according to DJ Shadow, the SP 1200 "had been around for like four years, the sound was well established, and it had some real audio limitations in terms of the bit rate and stuff". His routine is depicted in the 2001 documentary film Scratch. The Endtroducing album cover is a photograph taken at Rare Records by B Plus, showing producer Chief Xcel and rapper Lyrics Born (the latter wearing a wig), who like DJ Shadow were members of the SoleSides collective. ABB Records founder Beni B (wearing a baseball cap) is also seen in the full version of the photograph, which appears in the album's liner notes. DJ Shadow programmed, chopped, and layered samples to create tracks. He opted to sample more obscure selections, making it a rule to avoid sampling popular material. DJ Shadow said that "if I use something obvious, it's usually only to break my own rules." as well as DJ Shadow's then girlfriend Lisa Haugen. He finished recording Endtroducing in early 1996. DJ Shadow describes his albums as "really varied", and said of Endtroducing: "I feel like 'Organ Donor' sounds nothing like 'The Number Song' which sounds nothing like 'Midnight' and on and on." He said he was often depressed during the production of the album and that his "feelings of self doubt and self esteem come through in the music." Endtroducing is opened by "Best Foot Forward", a sound collage of record scratches and hip hop vocal samples. "The Number Song" uses multiple drum breaks and vocal samples of count offs. "Changeling" deviates from the previous uptempo tracks, incorporating new age sounds and gradually building toward a "sublimely spacey" coda. "What Does Your Soul Look Like (Part 4)" layers wordless chants over a looped bass groove, creating what Pastes Mark Richardson describes as an "uneasy" techno soundscape. Track six is an untitled interlude featuring a man reciting a monologue about a woman and her sisters over a funk backing. The two part "Stem/Long Stem" begins the second half of Endtroducing. John Bush of AllMusic called the track a "suite of often melancholy music, a piece that consistently refuses to be pigeonholed into any musical style." The first half, "Stem", sets strings against a recurring sequence of erratic drum beats, before giving way to the more ethereal "Long Stem", The sparse "Organ Donor" juxtaposes an organ solo and a drum break. DJ Shadow composed the track to express his dissatisfaction with the state of commercial hip hop music in the mid 1990s. It samples the bassline from Pekka Pohjola's "The Madness Subsides", as well as elements of David Axelrod's piano composition "The Human Abstract". "Napalm Brain/Scatter Brain" progresses slowly, starting with a bassline and a drum loop, then gradually increasing in tempo as additional instrumentation enters the mix.

Endtroducing has appeared in critics' lists of the greatest albums. Publications such as Pitchfork, Q, Rolling Stone, Slant Magazine, and Spin have placed it on their lists of best albums of the 1990s. Robert Christgau named it among his 10 favorite albums from the decade. NPR listed Endtroducing as one of the 300 most important American records of the 20th century, and Time selected the record as one of the "All Time 100 Albums" in 2006. It was also included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. In 2020, Rolling Stone ranked Endtroducing number 329 on its list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. Guinness World Records cited Endtroducing as the first album created entirely from samples. AllMusic editor Stephen Thomas Erlewine called it "not only a major breakthrough for hip hop and electronica, but for pop music." Tim Stelloh of PopMatters cited it as the "benchmark" for the genre. Will Hermes called Endtroducing "trip hop's crowning achievement" in Spin, and Jeff Weiss of the Los Angeles Times wrote that it defined American trip hop. Music journalist Trey Zenker described it as a "plunderphonics masterpiece" in an essay for Tidal, while Turk Dietrich of the American experimental music duo Belong said that it was a nearly unrivaled masterwork of sampledelia. Endtroducing inspired the British rock band Radiohead to edit and loop drums on their 1997 album OK Computer. Several artists sampled on Endtroducing, including David Axelrod and British rock band Nirvana, praised the album. DJ Shadow expressed surprise at the album's stature: "After the record, I'd always bump into these world class producers who'd say, 'Yeah, Endtroducing – what a great piece of production.' I just did it on one sampler in a tiny little studio." The acclaim set high expectations for future releases by DJ Shadow, and he expressed his dissatisfaction with being expected to "repeat Endtroducing over and over again". Nonetheless, DJ Shadow clarified that he views the album in a positive light: "People always seem to suggest that there's this pressure, and that Endtroducing is some kind of albatross, and I've just honestly never felt that way. I think that I have a healthy enough respect for the lineage of the music and how rare it is that you can connect with an audience. If that will always be 'the record' then so be it, that's cool." By April 26, 2005, Endtroducing had sold more than 290,000 copies in the US alone.

A deluxe edition of Endtroducing was released on June 6, 2005. A second deluxe edition commemorating the album's 20th anniversary, the Endtrospective edition, was released on October 28, 2016, featuring Excessive Ephemera, the remix album Endtroducing Re Emagined, and additional sleeve photographs and notes. A 25th anniversary reissue was released on September 24, 2021. The reissue was remastered at half speed at Abbey Road Studios from DJ Shadow's original DAT recording.

+Weekly chart performance for Endtroducing Chart (1996–2019) Peakposition Belgian Mid Price Albums (Ultratop Flanders) 29 European Top 100 Albums (Music & Media) 54 UK Dance Albums (OCC) 1 UK Independent Albums (OCC) 3