You're listening to Song Exploder,
where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made.
I'm Rishikesh Hirway.
In 1996, Josh Davis, aka DJ Shadow, released his first album, Introducing.
It's been hailed pretty much universally as one of the best albums of the 90s,
and Time magazine included it in its top 100 albums of all time.
It changed the face of hip-hop and electronic music, and helped define the trip-hop genre.
Now, for the 20th anniversary of the release, DJ Shadow breaks down the song Mutual Slump.
This is Josh Davis, a.k.a. DJ Shadow.
The record store on the cover of Introducing called Records in Sacramento,
California, that record store was my muse.
If I felt like I ever was kind of hitting a creative brick wall, I would get in my car,
I would drive to go to that record store once or twice a week for the entire duration that I was working on the album and just spend a few hours looking at records,
listening to records, and generally without really even trying very hard.
I would chance upon something that inevitably unlocked whatever jam I was in creatively.
And that's where I found the drums, which come from a European prog jazz record.
I think the only part of the original sample that I kind of left pretty much unchanged was the noisy...
the kind of drum fill with the guitar feedback over the top.
I don't like to just loop a one-bar break.
The rhythmic basis, the breakbeat,