DJ Shadow: "The landscape has changed, the rules have changed..."

The last time The Skinny spoke to Josh Davis things were different. Back in the summer of 2006, with the advent of The Outsider, the artist also known as DJ Shadow was about to come out swinging; sick of journalists asking why modern hip-hop sucked and well aware that his third studio album was about to divide staunch followers of the esoteric sample-heavy records that gave his alias weight.

Apparently at odds with his status as a critical darling and keen to steer away from the trappings of past successes – 1996 breakthrough Endtroducing continues to be upheld as his truest groundbreaking masterwork, while 2002’s The Private Press remains his greatest commercial triumph – The Outsider found the San Franciscan in combative mode, adding colours to his ‘palette’ that many purists found incomprehensible.

Politicised in the aftermath of the U.S. government’s botched reaction to Hurricane Katrina and faced with opposition to the ‘hyphy’ direction that the album explored, Davis was subsequently forced to publicly defend his new work when jeers erupted at live shows. With headstrong track titles like This Time (I’m Gonna Try It My Way) that made no bones about The Outsider’s agenda, his unlikely co-conspirator David Banner was on the money when he remarked in song: “Shadow, you’ve got some nuts for this one, baby.”

Currently enjoying one of his most productive years in some time, there’s a sense that Davis has come full circle as we catch up in 2011, having headlined the Glastonbury stage christened after John Peel – a vital channel to British audiences, pre-Endtroducing. “That was definitely a big one,” he admits. “Although I think everyone else around me felt so more than I did – the context of it being John Peel made it very relaxing for me in a way… very friendly.” He has since released The Less You Know, The Better in recent weeks – an album which, at least in part, makes efforts to reconnect with that lost audience. But Davis remains resolute that his last album did exactly what it was supposed to in culling the herd.

The Outsider was a bold album that some considered self-sabotage, and it took a lot of flak from fans and critics at the time, mainly because it didn’t fit with anything else you’d recorded. How do you look back on it now?
I’m definitely still proud of it, I think time has softened the harshness of some of the initial reactions – I think a lot more people get it now. At least, I’ve noticed a lot of people saying and writing that. But it did what it was designed to do: it separated the true fans from the marginal fans and it cleared the slate. I didn’t really know the extent that it was successful until I sat down to work on this record and I felt absolutely no agenda whatsoever; I just wanted to pursue the sounds that I enjoyed. I think it makes sense; it made this record flow a lot better. That’s not to say this wasn’t also a difficult record to make, but I think it should be difficult at a certain point. 

The Less You Know… seems like a clear return to sampling. Two of the initial songs you released – Def Surrounds Us and I’ve Been Trying – set its stall out as a jukebox album early on; one’s purely for the dancefloor while the other is this psychedelic ballad. Do you strive to produce a linear listening experience these days, or is it more important to present a challenge?
I certainly want it to hang together, to be a coherent listen, but I became aware a long time ago that I seem to listen to music in a different pattern to a lot of people. I think just by virtue of the fact that I’m a DJ, and by virtue of the fact that I receive a lot of music, I pursue a lot and digest a lot of music.

In my opinion there’s very little need for boundaries and for separating this from that. So the music that I make tends to – to some people anyway – sound a bit schizophrenic. Any combination of artists I put together is going to sound a bit silly. That’s how I listen to music – from Bad Brains to Little Dragon to some hip-hop demo cassette from 1987 to some 50s country western thing to some 1982 heavy metal record. That’s the way it is for me, so the music that I make tends to be equally diverse.

You can hear hints of dubstep on Def Surrounds Us, is that a development in music that you’ve personally enjoyed since you’ve been away from the limelight?
Yeah, I think it’s safe to say that’s an influence that’s crept in. But I think that’s just normal – any new style of music that comes along, and obviously dubstep’s been around for ages. Any new thing that creeps in, whether it’s drum’n’bass coming out of cars circa ‘94/’95 in London – all of these things work their way in. I don’t know how to make drum’n’bass, or dubstep for that matter, anymore than I know how to make 50s rockabilly or whatever. But once you hear it a few times, it becomes a new colour in your palette wheel. The trick is using just enough to give a new stylistic edge to the painting you’re working on without trying to imitate or steal from anybody.

There were a lot of guest MCs and vocalists on the last album that dictated its form to a degree, and a number of left turns at that – even by your previous standards with U.N.K.L.E. As a pioneer of instrumental hip-hop, were you cautious about going down that road again? 
At one point the record was going to be all instrumental, but I realised I was placing another restriction on myself. There were a few songs I felt could possibly be better with vocals and so I allowed myself to go down that road, but only on a few tracks. Little Dragon’s on one, Posdnous from De La Soul is on another, and a couple of other people.

The title seems to reiterate this feeling that's arisen in recent times, that we’re at the unhealthy end of the information age. Is that what you’re saying?
Yeah, I think that’s safe to say. I mean, I live in Silicon Valley, which is the primary test market for any new gadget, any new app, website, internet service – whatever you want to call it. You’re being told on a daily basis that your life is incomplete unless you go out and you buy this thing that’s supposed to be way better than the last thing which doesn’t do what it was advertised to do – it gets very wearying. I walk around and I see a lot of people not really understanding how they’re supposed to be internalising these messages. I see a lot of passionless, hollow, zombie-like people in America. Anyway, [sighs] the title refers to that! [laughs]. It’s just a bit much…

What keeps you driven these days, despite this state of affairs?
It’s a compulsion, just an overwhelming desire to contribute and to keep things pushing forward, because I value music so much in my life and I just desperately want to contribute to the lineage of it. And do what I can as a DJ to showcase other people, and to do what I can as an artist to express myself and try to offer an alternative to the landscape.

There’s a scene in [2002 documentary] Scratch where you’re pretty much swimming in vinyl as you talk about how important the medium is. With the dominance of digital music, are you still as big a crate digger now?
The landscape has changed, the rules have changed – the way I go about what I do has changed a lot, but I’m definitely still a hardcore collector, yeah.

On the other hand – and this is related to the spirit of your new album in a sense – can you still form close attachments to particular records when you have such a museum of music at your finger tips?
Well that may have been true at one point years ago, although I think that famous number comes from a quote that Questlove said on [National Public Radio] back in 2002, which I sampled on one of my mix CDs. It’s a lot more than that, but it’s sort of irrelevant in my opinion. I don’t have some false pretence that owning 100,000 records makes me a better DJ...

On the other hand, with a museum of records at your fingertips, can you still form close attachments to particular albums?
That’s a good question; I can think of one pretty good example where I had a friend come over to help me organise one of my storage units, and in return for his week of  lifting and moving vinyl around I let him take some records that he’d found. He took this one record, which I knew was rare and had never listened to before, and I probably bought it because the cover was a bit silly – it was a very amateurish pencil drawing of a man’s face. He got it home, called me up and said ‘listen, one of these records I took from you is fucking amazing; you’ve got to hear it’. So I heard it and now it’s one of my top wants. And that’s a record that came from my own storage unit. There are records I picked up on a trip in 2004 I still haven’t had a chance to listen to. But then I can still hear some records and it takes me back to a certain moment in time, as with anybody. But those records in my life that matter, I know where they came from and where they fit in.

What’s the status of Quannum [the independent hip-hop collective established by Davis alongside groups like Latyrx and Blackalicious in 1992]? Greatest Bumps still gets a lot of play in The Skinny office, there’s a fiver well spent in FOPP about 10 years ago…
Well, I suppose that like any group of friends, real life sets in and people get families, mortgages, there’s a lot of water under that bridge. I still communicate fairly regularly with several of the guys, I most recently saw everybody at Xavier’s [Chief Xcel] son’s birthday. Quannum still exists as a label, I haven’t been actively a part of it since 2004 and I made it pretty clear, once my wife was pregnant, that there was a lot going on in my life. I just said ‘look, I can’t dedicate the energy to this…’

But I always imagined it being a place that we’d keep going – keep that door open, so at any point any of us can return and have it as a resource. I genuinely feel that if I decided to use that to distribute my music then it would be there. I think relations are at a fairly healthy place, given what I know has eventually happened to so many other musical endeavours in the past. There are so many examples of things coming to a pretty ugly conclusion and I think we managed to avoid most of that.

Finally, you’re bringing the ‘Shadowsphere’ production to Glasgow in December, which is pretty far removed from your typical DJ booth. What can fans from both extremes of your catalogue hope for?
The type of show that I do, with the way the visuals are, it’s not like I change the set every night – the set is what it is and I just have to perform it as technically adept as I can. I mean I pride myself on actually doing stuff during the show, not just pressing play on a hard drive and moving my hands about. So long as every ten or fifteen minutes people hear something they recognise – as long as you keep the vibe going and dazzle them with things to look at and listen to – it’s OK.