Dj Shadow

Shadow is one of the people who pushed me to start spinning records on the turntables, someone who passed on to me part of that philosophy behind the mixer, making me look at the whole thing no longer as a simple mix of one song after another but as something generative, something that creates a personal sound that turns other people's songs into a world that becomes yours, and that of whoever happens to be listening to you at that moment.

Shadow hasn't produced anything truly significant in years, churning out formulaic albums that are sometimes good and sometimes mediocre, as is natural and bound to happen. Seeing him live is like going to mass once your faith has changed and disillusionment has crept in, dragging you away from being the happy spectator thrilled that things are working out great, but without that same passion that used to ride shotgun during the car trips I took as a newly licensed driver towards some horrible venue hosting my passion.

Shadow takes the stage alongside his magic sphere, inside which the set is set up and onto which the visuals will be projected throughout the whole performance. The tightrope-walking cut'n'paste of the no-longer-so-young Joshua Paul Davis is backed by a fairly readable kit from below the stage, featuring turntables, CDJs and mixer of course, but also an Akai sampler, various effects units, and — I'd guess — the inevitable Serato interfaces hooked up to a laptop.

We venture into the producer's restless world: the rotten, chaotic hip-hop that often spills over into d'n'b or drill accelerations is a continuous magma, moving arbitrarily between past hits and new tools, portraying Shadow as an artist who is not so much versatile as decisively single-minded — a virtue few can express with such sincerity, showing a huge passion for the meticulous hunt for the sample, and for treating composition as work that's not just cognitive, directed at himself, but also stimulating for the listener.

The fragmentary nature of Shadow's records is amplified a hundredfold throughout the whole live show, and a hundredfold again within each of the (five? forgive my shaky memory) segments, pilfering from everywhere in music, as we already know, but bringing his own instinctiveness into a live format that shows both all the strengths and all the limits of his music and his performance.

"Recorded music", anyone can make it well, and good for you if you think so, but Shadow's work remains cryptic and hard to decode, playing on the same turf as Daft Punk's live shows, with the drawback that the guru of live sampledelia can't really branch out, can't expand, because he simply is what he is and can't become anything else, and so neither can his music. What remains is the immense pleasure of seeing, live, what made me think "I want that too!" the first time I heard "Endtroducing", and of appreciating the towering skills of a man who was number one and is still number one when he drops "Building Steam With A Grain Of Salt" or the anthem "Organ Donor". Back when his gaze was fixed beyond the horizon while us young DJs were still struggling to keep our loops in time.

The other side of the coin is whether a live show structured like this, however engaging it might be, still makes sense, or whether it's just nostalgia for its own sake.

Who cares.

Special thanks to Alex Poltronieri for the photos and videos.

Thanks also to Nadia, for about a decade or so.

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