For over 30 years, Josh Davis has expressed his passion, taste and values through the music he creates as DJ Shadow. The name alone evokes a high water mark for instrumental hip-hop and songwriting.
From his first masterpiece Finishing…to the release of genre-hopping UNKLE pience fiction, to the supernatural elegance of The private press and his iconic single “Six Days,” to his underrated celebration of the Bay Area. The foreigner, his work in the 90s and the first decade of the 2000s is as essential as it is difficult to pin down. In the 2010s, Shadow released the extensive The less you know, the better, with his muscular forays into rock music, and closed the decade with the mountain will fall and Our Pathetic Era, both very ambitious and risky albums that featured some of his best rap collaborations working with Run the Jewels, Nas and De La Soul, among others. If there's a red thread running through this career, it's his restless ear, always seeking to rescue some forgotten gem from the dustbin of music history or a new burst of sound from the avant-garde.
It's a practice Shadow learned as a child, enamored of collecting comic books, baseball cards, 12-inch records, and precious songs captured on cassettes from the late-night radio waves of Northern California. With great seriousness and love, he will describe the second-hand transistor AM radio on which he first heard “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, when he was 10 years old. Or I find him mind-blowing with Public Enemy's “Rebel Without a Pause” and the wailing saxophone on that single.
At the heart of DJ Shadow's musical project is deep listening. “I always try to please or impress the most advanced listener.” he says. The kind of fan who will respect the layers and layers of synth that went into creating a sound that can't be easily identified but will make you want to share the track with a friend and say: “This part here.”
The first sampled words heard on DJ Shadow's upcoming album Action Adventurehis seventh solo LP, are “All my records and tapes.” In fact, they are some of the only words heard on what is an almost entirely instrumental release; are a thesis statement of sorts for an album that has its roots in the drifting, destabilizing days of the COVID lockdown. Action Adventure It is an introspective project, made only by Shadow without any collaborator. Action Adventure tells the listener: “It's about my relationship with music. My life as a collector and curator. All my records and tapes, and no one else's. The result is DJ Shadow's most exciting LP in years.
In March 2020, Shadow narrowly escaped a European tour for the release of their double album. Our Pathetic Era, landing back home in the Bay Area as the world shut down. She watched her two teenage daughters endure homeschooling and tried to process her own emotions about the tour being cut short; an album that he was proud of and that never had its moment in public. “It was a very intense moment” remember. For more than a year, she couldn't imagine making new music or listening to contemporary music. “It was as if the music that was coming out was somehow contaminated by the madness we were experiencing, the chaos and turmoil. I needed to temporarily sink into a bit of nostalgia, and not necessarily songs I knew.”—But music from a time that felt less tense.
Around the same time, in 2021, a friend directed Shadow to an eBay auction of about 200 tapes recorded on the radio of a mix station that served the Baltimore-DC area in the 1980s. During that time, he recorded Bay Area radio mixes and was also able to get New York mixes, but these mixes felt completely unique in their blend of dance music, R&B, and early hip-hop. They had a youthful, “we know no limits” quality that invigorated Shadow at a time when he desperately needed it.
Shadow started working on Action Adventure on January 1, 2022, and the first few tracks pushed him further into his songwriting bag. “I didn't want to write music formatted for vocalists. “I wanted to write music that reflected different energies.” he says. Although he is not classically trained, he asked himself questions such as “Which chord progression would be more natural here, and which would be less predictable?” and he worked according to the internal logic that seemed appropriate to him. His rule for the record was simple: no compromise. “I'm entering my fourth decade doing this: What do I want to represent? I know I don't want to make beats just for some potential vocalist I've never met and who may not share my vision. “I want this record to stand or fall based on my own credentials.”
“Ozone Scraper” starts the album with no preamble, just big, propulsive drums. It has the feeling of transportation, of jet engines that take the passenger to an impossible place. One of his favorites Action Adventure, “Ozone Scraper” is an invitation to buckle down and also sets the table for the kind of deep listening that Shadow loves. Advanced listeners will marvel at the type of “special effects,” as Shadow says, that's what created the elusive synth noises. Like a child marveling at a summer blockbuster, you wonder: How did he do this? “You Played Me” is a miracle that happened by pure chance. Inspired by eBay tapes, Shadow created a beat that had the crackling percussion and bubbling synths of classic '80s R&B, like a lost René and Angela hit. “I loaded up the instrumental and looped it on my computer to play forever.” he explains.
Then he began auditioning records from his collection that he had not yet processed: an experiment to find the voice in the haystack. “I dropped the needle on an acapella from a really obscure R&B 12-inch record from around '84, '85 and thought, 'That really works.'” Still, he wasn't entirely sure and sent the song to his label as a reference for a potential collaboration… whoever it took to have this sound, Shadow told them. However, after a few weeks, he realized that he already had what he needed: the acapella was correct. “It's an example of one of my favorite aspects of the music I make, which is 100% happenstance.” he says. “There are thousands of records next to me that are not going to work; The right record was played at the right time to change the course of my album. It's one of my favorite songs I've ever done.”
The album has a cinematic quality, especially in its sequencing. The final quarter, from “Fleeting Youth” to “Reflecting Pool” to “Forever Changed,” is as cathartic as a well-told story and ends on a triumphant note with “she she she's Evolving.” The oldest recording of Action Adventure, is another happy accident that almost didn't appear on the album. Shadow was initially hesitant to include a song from the damned early days of lockdown and planned to end the album with a much sadder song. But it didn't sit well with her and she kept coming back to “She's evolving,” until he stayed.
Title Action Adventure It evokes the halcyon days of video store browsing, and should provide an audience-friendly ending. Of course, this is still a DJ Shadow album, so don't mistake this for something cheesy. This is an album of little maturity, a revitalizing and focused release that suggests a refined late period of a great master of our time. “Rightly or wrongly, I don't think about anyone's musical desires but my own.” he says.
ACTION ADVENTURE
DJ SOMBRA
THE TOUR
04.07
BELFAST, ATTENTION CENTER 1
TICKETS ARE AVAILABLE FRIDAY, APRIL 19 AT 10 AM VIA TICKETMASTER.ES
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