A music podcast where we discuss our favorite albums, song by song. New episodes every other Tuesday.

170: DJ Shadow - Endtroducing..... (1996)

“Just being in here is a humbling experience because you’re looking through all these records, and it’s sort of like a big pile of broken dreams, in a way. Almost none of these artists still have a career, really, so you kind of respect that. If you’re making records and you’re a DJ and putting out releases, whether it’s mixtapes or whatever, you’re adding to this pile, whether you want to admit it or not.”

—DJ Shadow

It … is happening … again! This week, Producer Mike rings in 2026 with NorCal producer DJ Shadow’s 1996 masterpiece Endtroducing….., whose release was a watershed moment for the art of instrumental hip-hop. It’s in the Guinness Book of World Records as the first album to be composed entirely out of sampled sounds, but focusing on the technical achievement seriously undersells the depths of Shadow’s artistry. This is lively, organic music, with compositions that feel like sculptures crafted from the clay of music history, and the entire 21st-century DJing movement stands on the foundation of what Shadow accomplished here. Mike himself is a composer of sample-based music (including our awesome theme song) and a long-time admirer of Shadow’s work, and he’s invited Rich and returning special guest Shivam Bhatt to deconstruct an album that builds a mighty head of steam out of a grain of salt.

Miscellany

In the interest of not making a long episode any longer, Mike didn’t mention any of DJ Shadow’s series of DJ mix albums with Cut Chemist, Brainfreeze, Product Placement, and The Hard Sell: Encore, but all three are very much worth tracking down. The first two focus on funk 45’s, and the third is focused on whatever they feel like playing, including a tribute to De La Soul using the original sample sources.
Also worth seeking out is Shadow’s Diminishing Returns, consisting of one mix of hip hop and another mix of psychedelic rock.
During one of the shows on the Private Press tour that Mike saw, Shadow actually messed up the virtuosic “Organ Donor” solo, and told the audience afterwards that now they had proof he wasn’t just miming to a backing tape.
If you’re at all interested in the history and culture of turntable scratching, we cannot recommend the 2001 documentary Scratch highly enough. One particularly memorable scene features DJ Shadow in the record store basement where he discovered many of the records he used to make Endtroducing, and it is from this scene that this episode takes its epigraph.
Our special guest Shivam Bhatt is the host of the Magic: The Gathering podcasts Casual Magic and Shivam and Wheeler Love Magic and the Dragonlance podcast Chronicles of Dragonlance. He has previously joined us to talk about Takeshi Tateishi’s Mega Man 2 soundtrack, Dream Theater’s Metropolis Part 2: Scenes from a Memory, Björk’s Homogenic, Aphex Twin’s Richard D. James Album, and the compilation MTV’s Amp (part 1 and part 2).
With so many obscure sample sources, our Spotify playlist is a little less comprehensive than usual, but we put in as many songs as we could find (including the Garfield & Friends theme).

Discord & Rhyme Roll Call

Mike DeFabio (host)
Rich Bunnell (moderator)
Shivam Bhatt (special guest)

Endtroducing….. tracklist

Best Foot Forward
Building Steam with a Grain of Salt
The Number Song
Changeling / Transmission 1
What Does Your Soul Look Like (Part 4)
Untitled
Stem / Long Stem / Transmission 2
Mutual Slump
Organ Donor
Why Hip Hop Sucks in '96
Midnight in a Perfect World
Napalm Brain / Scatter Brain
What Does Your Soul Look Like (Part 1 – Blue Sky Revisit) / Transmission 3

Other clips used

DJ Shadow:

Rabbit in Your Headlights (with UNKLE)
Six Days (Remix)
High Noon
Lesson 4 (as The Shadow)
Entropy (with the Groove Robbers)
U.N.K.L.E. Main Title Theme (with UNKLE)
You Can't Go Home Again
Stem/Long Stem (from In Tune and On Time)
3 Freaks
Lonely Soul (with UNKLE)
The Number Song (Cut Chemist Party Mix)

Others:

Duran Duran - Hungry Like the Wolf
Bob Dylan - Ballad of a Thin Man
Childish Gambino - Survive
Ween - Exactly Where I'm At
Gang of Four - Glass
Black Flag - TV Party
Billy Joel - Captain Jack
Sparks - The Number One Song in Heaven
The Cars - Bye Bye Love
Sparks - I Can't Believe That You Would Fall for All the Crap in This Song
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five - The Message
Jeremy Storch - I Feel a New Shadow
Lexia - I Worship You
Ravi Shankar - Tala Sawari
Peter Gabriel - i/o (Dark-Side mix)
The Pointer Sisters - Pinball Number Count
Metallica - Orion
Third Guitar - Baby Don't Cry
Radiohead - Airbag
Kay Gardner - Touching Souls
Kay Gardner - Inner Mood I
Tangerine Dream - Invisible Limits
Loudon Wainwright III - The Man Who Couldn't Cry
Flying Island - The Vision and the Voice
Blackalicious - Release
Nirvana - Love Suite
Dennis Linde - Linde Manor
Run-DMC - Run's House
Osanna - Variazione III
Aphex Twin - Girl/Boy Song
Pugh Rogefeldt - Love, Love, Love
Björk - Possibly Maybe
Roger Waters & Ron Geesin - More Than Seven Dwarfs in Penis-Land
Garfield & Friends - Friends Are There
Giorgio Moroder - Tears
Madonna - Live to Tell (Confessions Tour)
The Outlaws - Chemical Donor
Pekka Pohjola - The Madness Subsides
David Axelrod - The Human Abstract
David Axelrod - The Shadow Knows
Baraka - Sower of Seeds
Meredith Monk - Biography
Meredith Monk - Dolmen Music
Rotary Connection - Life Could
Prefuse 73 - Nuno
Jo Ann Garrett - Walk On By
The Fantastic Epic's - Fun and Funk Part II
The Daly-Wilson Big Band - Space Odyssey - 2001
Sonny Sharrock - 27th Day
Takashi Tateishi - Level Start
The Heath Bros. - The Voice of the Saxophone
Shawn Phillips - All Our Love
David Young - Joe Splivingates
A Tribe Called Quest - Jazz (We've Got)
DJ Krush & Toshinori Kondu - Mu-Getsu
The Avalanches - Frontier Psychiatrist
The Other Leading Brand - Ritalin Rock
J Dilla - Time: The Donut of the Heart
Murray Roman - Freedom

Band/album personnel

DJ Shadow – production, engineering, mixing
Dan the Automator – engineering (assistant)

Credits

“Discord & Rhyme (theme),” composed by the Other Leading Brand, contains elements of:

Duran Duran - Hungry Like the Wolf
Amon Düül II - Dehypnotized Toothpaste
The Dukes of Stratosphear - What in the World?? ...
Faith No More - Midlife Crisis
Herbie Hancock - Hornets
Kraftwerk - Autobahn
Talking Heads - Seen and Not Seen
DJ Shadow - Stem/Long Stem (this episode only)

You can buy or stream Endtroducing….. and other albums by DJ Shadow at djshadow.com, your local record store, or the usual suspects such as Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, and Amazon. Follow Discord & Rhyme on Instagram, Threads, and BlueSky @DiscordPod for news, updates, and other random stuff. Editing is by Rich Bunnell, and special thanks to our own Mike DeFabio, the Other Leading Brand, for production and original music. See you next album, and keep as cool as you can.