The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
DJ Shadow · produced by DJ Shadow · Mo’ Wax · sixteen tracks, about 63 minutes
Mode
Hip-hop production made into album-length composition: the break, the loop and the sampler, with no MC
Mythos
The descent among the voices of the dead: one figure in the underworld of forgotten records, making them speak again
Phase
Sixteen tracks; three numbered Transmissions as a frame, after the fourth, after the eighth and at the end; four long pieces taking about half the time, between short sketches
Presentation
Album; sixteen tracks, about sixty-three minutes, by an unknown producer on a small London label
Register
Chopped and resequenced breaks, choral wash, piano, strings, prog and library records, film dialogue, finger drumming, crackle
Scale
One listener alone with the archive, at night
Governing Proposition
A young producer working alone with a sampler and a wall of records nobody wanted makes a hip-hop album with no rapper and no instrument of his own, and turns the producer’s craft of the break and the loop into long forms that build, break and descend, so that the discarded music of several decades is heard as one private grief, received like a signal at night.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The record opens on a sketch under a minute long, and its first gesture is a producer’s: a few seconds of cut and placed sound announcing that what follows was made on a sampler, from records. There is no rapper on the album, and no instrument played by its maker. Everything heard was already on a record before it was on this one. The method is the first thing stated, and the record never leaves it.
Endtroducing..... was first released in September 1996 by Mo’ Wax in the United Kingdom, the first album of DJ Shadow, the name under which Josh Davis made his records, and produced by him. It holds sixteen tracks in one sequence, about sixty-three minutes: Best Foot Forward, Building Steam with a Grain of Salt, The Number Song, Changeling, Transmission 1, What Does Your Soul Look Like (Part 4), Untitled, Stem/Long Stem, Transmission 2, Mutual Slump, Organ Donor, Why Hip Hop Sucks in ’96, Midnight in a Perfect World, Napalm Brain/Scatter Brain, What Does Your Soul Look Like (Part 1: Blue Sky Revisit) and Transmission 3. The album as first released is the unit; the 2005 deluxe edition and the 2016 anniversary reissue are context only.
Three numbered Transmissions recur as a frame, after the fourth track, after the eighth and at the end. Five tracks run under about a minute and a half. Four long pieces, Changeling, Stem/Long Stem, Napalm Brain/Scatter Brain and Blue Sky Revisit, take roughly half the running time, and two of them are joined pairs named with a slash. The two parts of What Does Your Soul Look Like on the album are Part 4 and Part 1, placed out of order, so that the record presents itself as a fragment of a larger, scattered whole.
Movement II
The first height comes early. A lone piano and a voice are lifted into a beat that seems to raise the floor, and the record declares its method and its temperature at once: cold, nocturnal, and moving. The drums are the signature. Breaks are chopped and resequenced by hand on a sampler with seconds of memory, so that the patterns shift, stutter and accelerate as if they were played. What is scored under The Made is that command, not the novelty of the means.
The tradition is hip-hop production: the break, the loop and the sampler as the producer’s instrument, always in the service of a rapper. Behind it stand the collage of Steinski’s Lessons, the density of Paul’s Boutique (1989), Coldcut, and the instrumental tracks of the Mo’ Wax circle, DJ Krush among them. The record takes the producer’s craft alone and makes of it an album-length composition, long forms that develop, recur and resolve, with the sampler handled as a composer handles an orchestra.
The stake was real. An unknown producer in his early twenties spent years on an album with no voice to sell it and issued it on a small London label into a hip-hop market that wanted rappers. The elements of the turn were in the air, and the record draws on a scene already moving its way; that keeps the swerve below the top. It has also been listed as the first album made entirely from samples, a claim that is disputable and that lends the record nothing here.
Movement III
The record’s largest summit is its eighth track. A string figure gathers over a broken, accelerating drum pattern until the piece tips into a long, almost liturgical aftermath. Changeling, before it, builds slowly to a height and lets a synthesiser line from another era break over it; Napalm Brain/Scatter Brain, later, reaches a strange, dissolving height in its second half. These are the places where the method becomes composition.
They are built by accretion and removal, layers added and taken away as a digger adds and discards records, so that the shape enacts the search. That is why the form cannot be changed without loss. Replayed on live instruments, the parts would keep their lines and lose their ghostliness, and the meaning would go with it: the crackle, the mismatched rooms and the voices from other decades are the content. Transitions between sections are an editor’s work of real skill, though some loops run longer than their interest and the low end is thin in places.
These long pieces are also where the record has kept yielding. For three decades listeners and producers have taken it apart sample by sample, and the identification of its sources became a small discipline of its own; the documentary Scratch and later accounts of the making have kept the method open to study. The layers separate on each return. Some of that yield is the yield of a puzzle, the finding of a source, rather than of the work, and the semantic return is narrower than the formal.
Movement IV
The record’s statement is its thirteenth track: a choral wash and a piano figure over a beat that never hurries, transport without event. Pieces that were never meant to meet are joined into a single breath, matched in key and tempo and set so that each is heard, and forgotten records become a nocturne of real loneliness. It is the purest height on the album and the passage that could least be spared.
What it discloses can be stated. A culture’s discarded music, the records no one wanted, holds a feeling its makers did not know it held, and a listener alone with the archive can reassemble from it a private grief. That is a real disclosure about belatedness, the condition of coming after and of making a self from what others left. It is held mostly as mood. The record tells how it feels to stand in the stacks at night; it states less about what that standing means for a person or a time.
The myth is the same scene seen deeper: a descent into an underworld of forgotten sound, where one figure gathers the voices of the dead and makes them speak again, the necromancer’s old pattern, and the record’s making enacts it. But there are no figures, only voices without names, and the pattern carries atmosphere more than load. What the record holds is a consciousness in solitude, memory and grief, the history of recorded music as material and subject, and the market through the discarded records. The couple, the family, labour, the state and the sacred do not enter, or enter only as the tone of a choir.
Movement V
Late in the record a joke and an elegy stand close together. Why Hip Hop Sucks in ’96 is a few seconds about money and the culture, the record’s only open statement about the world around it, and a slight one. Blue Sky Revisit is a slow descent in which a voice speaks of loss over a slowing beat. They obey one law, the found sound made to speak of loss and of the search for it: both are the digger’s voice, one turned outward in irritation, one inward in grief. The showpieces, The Number Song and Organ Donor, strain that law, obeying the craft more than the record. Then the last Transmission closes the frame, and the album ends as a signal received.
The four long pieces and Midnight in a Perfect World carry the argument and take most of the time; Untitled and Organ Donor are sketches, the second a showpiece of finger drumming that could go with small loss, and The Number Song is a display of craft more than a part of the argument. Necessity is high in the body and slack in about a quarter of the minutes.
Thirty years on, the record survives as issued, in print and reissued. It is placed high whenever its decade is counted, Midnight in a Perfect World has stayed in use in broadcast and film, and producers know the record as a text. Made of older records, it never had the sound of 1996, and its crackle has aged into it. It showed that the sampler could carry a whole album and that the archive could be the subject, and it shaped the instrumental hip hop that followed. Untrue (8.1), the nearest of the desk’s records in its figures, stands level with it; Mezzanine (8.4) and It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (8.5) stand above it.
Act III · The Twelve
Sixty-three minutes and sixteen tracks, and the subtractive test finds a strong core and a soft margin. The four long pieces are required: Changeling and Stem/Long Stem are where the method becomes composition, and Blue Sky Revisit is the needed descent before the end. Midnight in a Perfect World is the record’s statement and could not go. The Transmissions are required as frame: without them the album is a run of tracks, with them a broadcast received in sleep. The test bites at the margin. Untitled and Organ Donor are sketches; Why Hip Hop Sucks in ’96 makes its point in a breath; The Number Song displays the craft more than it argues.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Disclosure here is through sound, and it can be stated: a culture’s discarded music, the records no one wanted, holds a feeling its makers did not know it held, and a listener alone with the archive can reassemble from it a private grief. That is a real disclosure about belatedness, the condition of coming after and of making a self from what others left. Midnight in a Perfect World turns forgotten records into a nocturne of real loneliness. But the condition is held mostly as mood. The record tells how it feels to stand in the stacks at night and states less about what that standing means for a person or a time.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Elevation is the record’s chief good, and it comes often, of a cold, nocturnal kind. Building Steam with a Grain of Salt rises early from a lone piano and a voice into a beat that seems to lift the floor. Changeling builds slowly to a height and lets a synthesiser line from another era break over it. Stem/Long Stem is the largest summit, strings gathering over a broken, accelerating drum pattern until the piece tips into a long, almost liturgical aftermath. Midnight in a Perfect World is the purest height, transport without event. Blue Sky Revisit closes in slow grief. The sketches between are flat.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Myth is evoked often and in one frame half built. The evocations are many: the changeling, the soul and its look, a dream transmission warning the present, the voices of the dead speaking from records. The frame is the descent into an underworld of forgotten sound, where a lone figure gathers the voices of the past and makes them speak again, the old pattern of the one who goes down to the shades. The Transmissions build that frame across the record and close it. What holds the axis lowest of the eleven is that the particular is thin: there are no figures, only voices without names, and the frame carries atmosphere more than load.
Score: 7.3 / 10
The inheritance is hip-hop production, the break, the loop and the sampler as the producer’s instrument, always in service of a rapper; behind it the collage of Steinski’s Lessons, the density of Paul’s Boutique (1989), Coldcut, and the instrumental tracks of the Mo’ Wax circle, DJ Krush among them. The turn is to take the producer’s craft alone and make of it an album-length composition, long forms that develop, recur and resolve. The stake was real: an unknown producer in his early twenties, years of work, and an album with no voice to sell it, issued into a market that wanted rappers. Its elements were in the air, and that keeps it below the top.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Change the form and the record stops knowing what it knows, because the knowledge is the method. A record about the archive and about coming after is made entirely of the archive: every sound was already a record. Replayed on live instruments, the parts would lose their ghostliness, and the meaning with it; the crackle, the mismatched rooms and the voices from other decades are the content. The long forms are built by accretion and removal, as a digger adds and discards records, so the shape enacts the search. The sequence is counted here, once: the Transmissions frame it as a signal received. The sketches sit as a mixtape’s filler, not as parts of the form.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Thirty years is evidence, and much of it is formal. The record has been taken apart sample by sample by listeners and producers for three decades, and identifying its sources became a small discipline of its own; the documentary Scratch and later accounts of the making have kept the method open to study. The yield in the recording is real: the layers of Stem/Long Stem and Napalm Brain/Scatter Brain separate on each return, and the way a source changes with where it is set repays close hearing. Semantic depth is narrower. The mood is single and deep, and once its grief is heard the record returns the same answer more than new ones.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The field is hip-hop and electronic production of the mid 1990s. The intrinsic force is high: the record showed that the sampler could be a composer’s instrument for a whole album, that a hip-hop producer could make long-form instrumental music with no rapper and be heard as an artist, and that the archive itself could be the subject. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the instrumental hip hop of the following decade, RJD2’s Deadringer (2002), Blockhead and the producers of Ninja Tune and Mo’ Wax, UNKLE’s Psyence Fiction (1998), Cut Chemist and the turntable crews. It shaped a genre and a practice rather than redirecting popular music, and much of it was being done beside it.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Survival is weighed over thirty years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the record survives as issued, in print, reissued in 2005 and 2016, and streamed. Presence is continuous and wider than its sales: it is placed high whenever its decade’s albums are counted, Midnight in a Perfect World has stayed in use in broadcast and film, and producers know the record as a text; that presence is among musicians and critics more than among the public. The fabric is less fixed to its moment than most records of 1996: made of older records, it never had the period’s sound. A fabric of uncleared samples is one that law could disturb, though it has not.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The making is load-bearing. The drum programming on Building Steam with a Grain of Salt and Stem/Long Stem is the record’s signature: breaks chopped and resequenced by hand on a sampler with seconds of memory, so that the patterns stutter and accelerate as if played. Sources from different decades and rooms are matched in key and tempo and set so each is heard, and Midnight in a Perfect World joins pieces never meant to meet into a single breath. The transitions in the long pieces show an editor of real skill. The limits fall on a share: some loops outrun their interest, the low end is thin in places, and the sketches show craft as display.
Score: 8.5 / 10
One law governs the record: the found sound, made to speak of loss and of the search for it. The two most distant elements are Why Hip Hop Sucks in ’96, a joke about money and the culture, and Blue Sky Revisit, a slow elegy. They obey the law in part: both are the voice of the digger, one turned outward in irritation, one inward in grief, and the joke is about the same market that discarded the records the elegy is built from. The range is wide, from hard breaks to choral wash and film dialogue. The strain is in the showpieces, The Number Song and Organ Donor, which obey the craft’s law more than the record’s.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held fully, as solitude, memory and grief, and the night is its place. The history of recorded music is held as material, decades of it, and as a subject, the archive and what a culture throws away. The market enters through the joke about hip hop and money and through the discarded records themselves. The dream and a vague apocalypse are evoked through the Transmissions. The couple, the family, labour, the state and the sacred are absent, or glimpsed only in the tone of the choral passages. Three orders are integrated and one evoked, and that sets the figure lowest of the twelve.
Score: 6.9 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.1 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Sublime at 8.6, then The Living Form, The Made and The Imperishable at 8.5. Five or six real heights in sixteen tracks, Stem/Long Stem and Midnight in a Perfect World the highest; a form made entirely of the archive it is about, its long pieces built by accretion and removal; drum programming chopped by hand to sound played, and sources from different decades matched into one breath; and a recording whole after thirty years, never fixed to its year’s sound.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.9: a consciousness in solitude and grief, recorded music as material and subject, and the market through its discards, with the couple, the family, labour, the state and the sacred absent. Below the rest, The Archetypal Deep at 7.3: a descent among the voices of the dead, framed by the Transmissions and borne by no figure. Then The Unconcealment at 7.8: belatedness disclosed as mood more than stated as meaning. They are one fact: the record is the interior of one listener in the archive, and it does not name what it finds there.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.5, The Made at 8.5, The Inner Law at 8.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable meets the bar of 8.5 exactly at 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.3, Pressure on Tradition at 8.3, The Unconcealment at 7.8 and The Archetypal Deep at 7.3 fall short. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Archetypal Deep, 7.3, below 7.5; no other axis it counts falls below 7.8, The Unconcealment. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.9. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 97.1, an average of 8.09 that displays 8.1, in Tier IV, a tenth above the 8.0 at which it begins and short of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · the album as first released by Mo’ Wax in the United Kingdom in September 1996, sixteen tracks in their original sequence, about sixty-three minutes, produced by DJ Shadow, with a United States issue through FFRR and London later that year; judged from knowledge of the recording and its reception. No recording was in hand, and running times are approximate and used in no argument. The 2005 deluxe edition, with its second disc of demos, alternates and a live set, and the 2016 anniversary reissue are context and evidence for survival, not the object. The record’s words are all sampled voices: tracks are cited by title, and nothing is quoted. A listing of the record as the first album made entirely from samples is disputable and is not relied on. Facts that could not be verified, among them the exact day of release, the sampler, turntables and studio with which the record was made and the length of its making, the sources of its samples, the earlier issue of the other parts of What Does Your Soul Look Like, and the later producers said to name it as a founding record, are not given.