How sampling pioneers DJ Shadow and the Avalanches adapted to digital music era
The American instrumental DJ and Australian electronic music group, whose unrelated debut albums pushed the art of crafting new sounds out of existing music, are back with new albums after hiatuses
In the autumn of 1996, DJ Shadow blew minds around the world using materials he found in a dusty basement in California. Four years later, the Avalanches did much the same from their headquarters in Melbourne, Australia.
Both debuts made new music almost exclusively out of old sounds: riffs and grooves and snippets of speech harvested from forgotten vinyl records and carefully assembled into original songs. The works felt modern and ancient at the same time. Neither act invented the method, but each expanded its potential for emotion, humour and technical finesse.
Since then the landscape has changed, of course. Sampling became simpler thanks to YouTube and other vast digital-media archives. Technology made it easier, too, to stitch the samples together.
And that made room for the likes of Girl Talk, the pop-wise party-starter who’s been the most prominent cut-and-paste specialist of the past decade.
Yet DJ Shadow and the Avalanches are still here. Twenty years after the release of Endtroducing (whose cover photo immortalised the record shop where the California native did much of his spelunking), they have new albums that reckon with the value of continuity and need to evolve.