Album: Endtroducing....
Artist: DJ Shadow
Submitted by: Cotey
Year: 1996 (debut studio album)
US Billboard Peak: 37th Top Heatseakers (17th in UK Album Chart)I was completely caught off guard by Cotey's selection of DJ Shadow - Endtroducing. I never heard of him, or even knew what he was. I imagined it was some kind of techno or rap music just because the word DJ was in the artist title. My first reaction was that I liked the title, and when I began looking at the cover art and track listing it had promise. I find when they use repetitive track names it usually means that a theme will follow, i.e. Transmission #1, Transmission #2. The part of this study is to see how the "album" is designed as a whole to convey a message.
Not knowing what to expect, I began listening. The first track reminded me heavily of mid 90s Beastie Boys with a fast beat, dialogue audio samples and scratching. As a fan of the Beastie Boys, I was looking forward to hearing more as I settled in to my preconceived notions of what was to come. The second track instantly took a turn on my thought process of what was to come. The sound was more familiar to a Moby style track with layered strings, heavy beats and what I call "found dialogue". Still not disappointed with this change.
The songs played out ominously painting a mood more then a picture. The layers of audio drew me in. The added touches of depth from the beats, strings and dialogue gave you lots to take in. The added touch of the faint sounds of an analog hiss in the background with pops of a needle spinning on vinyl added to an overall feel of the crafted sound. As the tempo grows and power added to the repetition, DJ Shadow breaks up the pattern with erratic looping of recognized beats to bring you out of the trance of rhythm and into the "now" of the song. Though a pure techno sound, a feeling of a free style jazz splashes you like cold water as the stuttering beat loop hits. You mentally wake up trying to guess what the next beat would be, opening your ears to the layers of sound.
The album continues to play sharing common occurrences and patterns. As an example, a organ is a regular character that its melody plays in the background of a few tracks for mere glimpses. Later in the album it gets a more "solo" type performance in the track of its own.
This album has depth in its audible layers, but does a great job of not really playing out a defined story as I usually try to seek. Instead it explores a emotional tie to the track at hand. He also uses "found" dialogue to accompany many of the tracks. I have always been a fan of not only "found footage" but the spoken word. Intertwined with music, it adds another level. Much how in a narrative film, you edit a scene and then add sound and music to it to enhance the emotion of a scene. If a scene calls for a certain tension, one might lay down a heavier song to amplify that emotion. If done too much, we would call that music choice to be "heavy handed" or "over dramatized". The music is transcribing to the audience what the emotion should be oppose to the actors and dialogue. If done correctly, the music can help enhance the work of the actor and story. I found with DJ Shadow, he used dialogue to enhance the music (oppose to film where music enhances the dialogue). By putting in splatter of found dialogue, it helped to enhance the emotion of the track. Having an actor talk about being wrongfully incarcerated added to the tension of the beats. Having a girl talk about her past and stories of rollerskating enhanced the sensuous tones of the track.
The added part was that it had a "found footage" quality to it. Couldn't pin point the actors or the story and it made you question if they were orchestrated for the album or just randomly added to it. With out a background knowledge of the dialogue source, you were free to paint your mental picture to add to the sound. I had a friend who DJ'd in college and he too liked to mix in dialogue into his tracks. As said before, always a huge fan of spoken words incorporated with music or image. However, when he did it, I found it fell flat and didn't deliver. Sure the crowd would cheer to the sounds of Optimus Prime or He-man (grabbed from children storybook albums he found at thrift stores). I never knew why, to me, these snippets never incorporated well into it. I originally thought it might just be he was an inexperienced DJ playing to a crowd of Gen X'rs. However, after experiencing Endtroducing, I find it to be more of the association of sound to music. The choice of dialogue enhanced the music and complemented the emotion. A more recognizable source of dialogue I think would bring in all the emotional "excess baggage" of its source and deliver a heavy handed, over dramatized emotion. Instead it draws you even more in to explore the sound.
As this being DJ Shadows debut album, I really look forward to hearing some of his later stuff and exploring more into this genre. I have listened to this album several times and love it. I feel if I owned a martini lounge, this would be the first album I would play on a Friday night before opening to set the mood for the evening.
