DJ Shadow Interview

Holding a Guiness World Record for the first ever entirely sampled album, along with a record collection that consists of an estimated 250,000 records, we spoke to DJ Shadow ahead of his ‘All Bases Covered’ tour, coming to Australia in February.

Hi how are you?
Hey! Good how are you?

Good thanks! So first of all, where are you speaking to us from?
I’m just at home, just in the Bay area.

I’m a fan of the Bay area Hip-hop, how did you come to live there? Did you start off somewhere else?
No I’m born and raised here, I’ve always lived in the same 100 mile radius.

The ‘Lesser You Know The Better’ album is really diverse, you’ve really mixed up melancholic ballads, to Hip-hop, a bit of Soul, mixed with a bit of Hard Rock and Metal as well, which is
different, but it’s cool. How do you do it? Do you jump in the crates or is it a bit more planned, how do you set out those albums?
Every album is different, but they all start with me playing through albums and trying to latch onto a wavelength. Every album has a muse of sorts in the form of a record store. So introducing the record store on the cover was sort of a muse, the guiding force. If I was stuck on writing, I would jump in the car and drive to that record store and spend some
time in the basement because some of the music in there, I would never be able to look through all the records, it was impossible.

That’s the great thing about a record shop you’ve got thousands of different perspectives. Is that something that’s drives you? Because you have loads of different angles you can come from.
Yeah, a lot of records used to be, a lot of material coming in and out, the earth was being turned over. It’s not like that over here anymore and I know that from coming over to the UK as well. In ‘Private Press’, ‘The Muse’ was a record store here that had a really prolific Post Punk/New Wave collection that had sold out the entire store and nobody else
was really listening to that stuff or buying it. I just discovered this interesting and quirky [music] from all over the globe that was really far reaching, that’s really informed a lot of the sounds on my second album. On ‘The Less You Know The Better’, I guess this was a bit harder to pin down. I recorded it all in a little cottage, which sounds quaint, in Sinoma.

Your backlog is incredible, is there anything you feel you haven’t covered or have any unfinished business that you want to polish off?
With ‘The Less You Know The Better’, I wanted to create an album in the way people were accustomed to me working, which is by using a lot of samples. I was striving to making the sad songs, very sad, and songs like ‘I Gotta Rock’ sound very extreme in their own directions and do my best and really try to immerse myself in the music in the same pain staking way I’ve worked all these years. In some ways I think [of] it [as] significant, the end of the certain sound. Really doing that process and just before I felt the music I was making under my name
sake wasn’t necessarily the music I was playing at home or wanted to make in the future. That’s not to say that I’m not 100% behind, just that I feel like I’ve got a bit older and I’m a DJ and a recording artist of course and I feel like there’s a certain sound and a certain aesthetic and a certain set of principles that identify with me. In some cases I’ve out grown those. So, lately I’ve been making music that I think people would not identify me with, that DJ Shadow’s found and that’s a really positive thing.

You’ve got more records than Johns in the phonebook and are better at scratching than most DMC champions. How did that all begin for you, with the scratching, the record collecting and in general, the whole gig?
I’ve always collected records, before I was just a normal kid in the 70s, I collected hot wheels and comic books and anything that was cheap. However, I found my true calling when I first listened to Hip-hop. I wasn’t in the typical groups at school like the Metal kids or the Punk Rockers and I never felt like I fit in.

You were in the Guinness Book of Records for the first completely sampled album. Was there any intention of becoming a record breaker or is just a natural thing of being a sampler?
I was just trying to take the samples as far back as I could and show to people that, y’know because if you rewind back to that time which is the 90s, most producers within Hip-hop had started to forego sampling or make the samples that you used really obvious, and this is pointing to the cross over of many rap hits of the mid 90s. There was a lot of
debate about whether sampling was dead and how live instrumentation could take [over], meanwhile in my little world, we really didn’t pay any attention to that discussion because we knew there was so much more to be discovered. It’s all about showing people that it’s an art form in itself.

When Judgment Day comes and Noah says you’ve got to get the fuck on the ark and you have to bring three records (and an MPC60 and two Technics and three channel mixer) what are
you going to bring?
Hashim’s first 12 inch un-cutting which is called ‘Al Naayfiysh’, which I believe is Arabic for the “soul”, it was an important Electro 12 inch and it’s just a really important record in my life. I’d say Public Enemy’s second album ‘It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back’, which by the way I haven’t listened to in easily a decade, but it’s heavily embedded in my
soul, that’s the type of record for me. Lastly, my most recent album probably, because it’s still fresh to me, it’s already a couple of years old but I feel like I didn’t get sick of the songs like I did on some other things. People are still discovering it and it’s nice to know it didn’t completely vanish into the world.

Coming up in February you’ve got a tour in Australia and going to lots of different places like the Perth Festival, but if there was any country you had to go to, where would it be and how have your experiences in Australia been before?
I was able to go there quite early in my career and the good thing about being associated with Molax is that James and I had a similar vision about music and we felt that there should be no barriers in terms of where we should go to share our music. So in the first couple of years of going to Europe, I was also able to visit Japan and Australia and laid a lot of ground for the career I now enjoy and pretty much go anywhere in the world and people will show up and see what I’m up to. I hate to use the word blessing, but it’s a really nice facet in my career, put it that way. But, if I had to put it down to one place, I would say Manchester, because it’s one of the most memorable shows where everyone was hanging on my every last
word, my last beat, including the Warehouse Project I did last year.

Where there any venues you particularly enjoyed when you played in Australia with James Lavell or when you were back in 2011?
There’s a lot of lovely theatres in Melbourne, there’s the Holden Pavillion in Sydney which I’ve played a few times. I’ve done a lot of festivals in Perth and Brisbane.

DJ Shadow will be touring Brisbane, Sydney, Perth, Melbourne from 7th-15th February.

By Merlin Ramos