List item: Listen to the 250 greatest albums
Progress: 154/250
Title: Entroducing…..
Artist: DJ Shadow
Year: 1996
Position: #76
Yes, yes, I know I should be listening to the older albums on this list in order to keep up with my progress (or lack there of) in the 1001 songs list. However, I have really been in the need of instrumental music at my job – so this album sounded like the perfect thing to listen to.
Entroducing….. has the distinction of being the first album to be created entirely out of samples. It’s an album that has been undeniably influential in how sampling is done and how beats can be constructed on a small scale. Yet this is one of the few albums (and artists) that, upon starting this list, I had never heard off.
Extensive sampling is so commonplace now that it’s really cool to know that a flash point, like Entroducing….., actually exists. So often you had albums, like Blue Lines, where sampling was interposed with original content, but this really is a singular vision.
The most impressive thing about Entroducing….., however, is the variety. This is describes as an instrumental hip-hop album; yet there are elements of ambient, trip-hop, electronica, glitch, shoegaze and noise pop. Rather than this being a series of tracks mixed into each other, you find yourself standing on constantly shifting ground.
You have tracks that are moody (Mutual Slump) and chilled (Changeling and Midnight In A Perfect World) but then there are those which betray the hip hop roots really well (The Number Song). Yet everything here does feel united by some degree of signature commonality that is incredibly engaging.
In some ways the samplings used earmark this as an album that comes from the 1990s. However, there are also times where I would have believed that this had been released this year and was influenced by the works of Panda Bear and Jamie xx. It’s albums like this that make me happy to be doing the lists; something completely unknown that I have truly enjoyed.
Before I Kick 