Take A Byte Out: DJ Shadow, the Avalanches and the History of Plunderphonics
Written by Nathan Evans
Featuring artwork by Becky McGillivray
Additional editing by Anouska Liat
‘Derivative’ is a bitter word in music, inviting metonyms such as ‘unoriginal’ or ‘generic’ ideas. However, one of the hardest truths the industry has yet to overcome is that some of the most inspired concepts are made entirely from stolen assets.
Plunderphonics was originally conceived by John Oswald with an essay regarding the ethics and theory behind sampling, and a 1985 record of the same name. Visualised by a scrapbook remake of Michael Jackson’s Bad cover (now sporting a cracking downstairs bush), it opened discussion on the merits of taking an existing audio recording, and altering it to make a brand new composition. Turning the sampler from a documentation device into a creative tool, the technique had been used before it was coined, by experimental artists like the Residents and Jean-Jacques Birgé, but also classical composers who blended musical quotes from other writers to form a new piece.
Transitioning into the late 80s and early 90s, the practice was utilised as a tool of enhancement, a paint bucket that washed over two notable projects from wildly different fields.
Oswald continued to inject his ideas into the 90s with an equally ambitious task, building a 2-disc set of compositions strung from a Grateful Dead single (yes, a two-minute single), titled Grayfolded . By taking and “folding” over a hundred different live performances of the track ‘Dark Star’, encompassing Dead’s entire line-up catalogue in the process, Oswald had successfully adopted the improvisational mantra of the band’s legendary shows.
Following up License To Ill required a herculean effort, one that saw the Beastie Boys took their newfound success and commandeered away from Rick Rubin’s bombastic rap-rock, and towards a post-modern thrift-store of swirling sample-play. The result was a thick jungle of kaleidoscopic sound collages, unearthed by the Dust Brothers and later dubbed “sampledelia”, that took fans years to fully discern and appreciate.
Later in the decade saw electronic acts become superstars through the mainstream success of house music and big beat, a sign of the general music crowd’s gradual acceptance of synthetic forms of dance music. At the height of electronica in the 90s and early 00s, two albums would go on to become the golden showpieces for plunderphonics.
DJ Shadow - Endtroducing…
DJ Shadow took plunderphonics to new heights with his debut album, Endtroducing, the first full-length ever to be entirely made from samples. Inspired by the iconic Bomb Squad beats that blast all the way through Public Enemy’s politically-charged It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Shadow compiled thousands of vinyl records to create his own legend.
Though classified as instrumental hip-hop, its complexities reach far beyond just boom-bap, to the worlds of funk, psychedelia, ambient and soundtrack music. The grand total is a record that’s as dark and jazzy as a smoky metropolis, punctuated with an alley-crowding number of textural flavours. The meticulosity of Shadow’s approach to sampling is apparent when examining the skeleton of his beats, where a single one could have a kick drum from one song, the snare from another. It equates to a very particular style of dirty breakbeat that can splash like the fast-footed ‘The Number Song’ or, in the case of the brutish ‘Midnight In A Perfect World', can slump and caress a track the same way trip-hop artists did in 1996.
While the drum-kit beats build the membrane of each cut, the inner atrium of each song is usually made from keyboards and chords; a touch of lounge-jazz and a heaping of melancholia allows California-native Shadow to paint the empty side-streets of New York. The blueprint is then capped with shavings of vocals and record scratches that add a frantic character to the album while always maintaining the acknowledgement of his skills as a turntablist.
The record doesn’t stop there instrumentally, however. Take the abridged ‘Organ Donor’, where, after a false start, a pining organ loop is contorted into its own solo atop a no-frills boom-bap pulse - a song with this creative an idea should be longer. Violin mixes into the aforementioned ‘Number Song’, as well as frenetic vocal snippets that act as musical graffiti. The cut is a true highlight to take away from Endtroducing, as energising as it is menacing. And, in reference Shadow’s love for cool jazz, saxophone plays a key role in tracks like ‘Mutual Slump’ and ‘What Does Your Soul Look Like, Pt. 1’, which wails in the background and sound as longing as the vocal snippets alongside.
All of these pieces that make up the genetics of Endtroducing are distilled most potently on its first full song, ‘Building Steam with a Grain of Salt’. Stemming from a dusty piano loop, a forceful chord stab infiltrates to add menace and drama, further backed by choral vocals that could have ripped from a movie soundtrack. It’s actually extracted from Jeremy Storch’s ‘I Feel A New Shadow’, an unturned stone of progressive pop from the early 70s that contributes to the baroque feel of Shadow’s flip. Digging deeper reveals his ability to do what great producers from this time period did to create successful beat music - setting a tone, and then toying with the elements. Transpired from the big beat scene that features the likes of Fatboy Slim and the Chemical Brothers, the technique allows for ideas to be extended far longer than the length of a radio edit, while simultaneously letting each element have their time in the spotlight to be absorbed. Take the slow funk guitar that seeps in at the halfway point as if Shadow is finding and sponging up new samples on the fly, or the clanging drums that maintain a straightforward, non-intrusive groove until being offset and contorted to impressively string a full drum solo. The underlying accomplishment in all this is how he sources such far-reaching samples, alters them with reckless abandon, and joins them into a rugged yet harmonious mosaic, and this perseveres throughout Endtroducing. Clearly, Shadow has enough to sustain a single track this long without overfilling the pot, and he even utilises the cohesiveness of his work to bring together a well-groomed concept.
Marching like a lost cut from a fantasy blockbuster soundtrack, ‘Stem / Long Stem’ possesses a harp from ‘Love Suite’ by Nirvana (no, the UK prog band) that has that mediaeval, GoT-like drama. Playing off an opposing guitar part, they sound as though they’re about to face off on the sonic battlefield created by the creeping, intermittent stomp of a drum. Vocal samples from The Mystic Number National Bank and KRS-One pops off the swelled Japanese strings taken from an old folk-rock record by country legend Dennis Linde, but the weightlessness of this moment is disturbed by lightspeed, Run-DMC-snatched drums that signal a high-drama climax. Everything screeches to a halt, leaving nothing but silence to fill the void as Shadow transitions into the second part of the double-billed track. A lone keyboard fades in to survey the scene, slowing reviving every element piece by piece into something new yet mournful, like a funeral dirge.
As much as the then-24-year-old finds new ways to use plunderphonics for advantage, it is unequivocal that Endtroducing is an album that primarily celebrates the practice of crate digging. To paraphrase an interview with DJ Shadow from this time, he subverts and decontextualises the samples he picks, and spits them back out into something more relevant to what’s around him. However, this isn’t why his first feature-length is hailed as a masterpiece - it’s because while the physical limitations of exclusively using samples hold many others back, for Shadow, it seems to have the opposite effect.
Since I Left You
Elsewhere, halfway around the world, a group of Australian turntablists and producers were attracting praise with small releases that made inevitable comparisons to DJ Shadow’s style. In 2000, that band of vinyl nerds known as the Avalanches dropped their debut album - Since I Left You.
Seemingly in an attempt to top what Endtroducing had accomplished, the Avalanches sewed together a record shop’s worth of sonic specimen that jointly fabricated an outlandish tapestry of soul, electronica and dance music. A fan-made video on YouTube that breaks down all the known samples used is over 30 minutes long, and it barely touches down on the more hidden appliques, not for concision’s sake, but because they have not been identified. This record is a goliath, every part built from second-hand materials. Even down to the album’s cover art, itself dissected from Fred Dana Marsh’s Sinking of USS President Lincoln. That choice of aesthetic also adds to the distinct Maritime feel of the world, awash in analogue glow every nautical mile of the way.
Since I Left You’s eponymous track welcomes the listener to this cruise ship around the world with a perfect opening statement that sounds like an unturned gem from a lost soul complication. As silk strings and doo-wop harmonies cascade down to give setting, a flute comes in to pour colour from end to end, while the drums dye the scene with a slight hip-hop tint. Atop all this, the infectious vocals from 60s pop-rock quartet The Main Attraction are pitched and repurposed for the main chorus line, continuing into the epilogue song, ‘Stay Another Season’, one of the few songs to successfully acquire rights to sample the iconic bassline from Madonna’s ‘Holiday’.
When brainstorming the outline of the project, the Avalanches wanted to create a concept album about “an international search for love from country to country”, exploring different lands and sounds along the way. Although this idea wasn’t translated as literally on the final product, it still serves as a genre-hopping tour across the globe in 60 minutes. Take how the group manage to interweave ‘Electricity’ - a swirling piece of hip-hop alchemy that espouses G-funk and Daft Punk - into the corpulent nu-disco beat of ‘A Different Feeling’.
Conversely, ‘Two Hearts in ¾ Time’ is a whimsical waltz-metered cut that radiates the energy of romance. Summoning a swirling e-board effect, it unfurls as a pristine ode to jazz fusion with its sprightly drum pattern. The animation is furthered with female vocals lala-ing adjacent to a faint plodding tuba, and the gliding key solo at the core is one of the many moments that suspend disbelief that all parts used are from scrap.
The reason why the Avalanches can effectively straddle such an amalgam of musical disciplines is the remarkable flow of the record. Each track passes beautifully into one another, with every transitionary moment holding their own ideas and micro-collages. The concluding moments of ‘Two Hearts’ cross-fade into a prominent Raekwon vocal sample (‘Avalanche Rock’) for a brief interlude before being spit back out at ‘Flight Tonight’. Perhaps the most contemporary track (for its time), it’s very much in the same chamber as the Chemical Brothers, complete with rumbling breakbeat drums and extraterrestrial sound effects. It’s perplexing to think that it is in a completely different latitude to the previous full track, nonetheless tissued by seconds of music; the warp-speed momentum of Since I Left You escapes its audience even when actively listened to, so natural do the connections feel.
Another key aspect to the thrill of the Avalanches’ debut LP is the sheer excess of dialogue samples. Developing on DJ Shadow’s use of spoken excerpts, sources include stand-up great Richard Pryor, Nigerian activist and musician Fela Kuti, comedy duo Wayne & Shuster, and children’s TV show Sesame Street, all of which are placed in rhythmically, they are as big a part of the music as any other element. Contributing greatly to the scrapbook jungle of the music, its most prominent spotlight is heard on the record’s most iconic moment, ‘Frontier Psychiatrist’. The only song to truly have a verse-chorus structure, it achieves this by chopping up scenes of dialogue from various skits to piece together a story centred around a mentally-challenged boy who, as one will definitely gather, needs therapy. Horse squeals and war sounds are all set to the tempo of these hefty drums, but one cannot prepare themselves for how the group scratches up a parrot’s squawk, easily one of the most genius moments of lunacy in plunderphonics history.
The diverse style-morphing is relentless entering the beach-ready final act that features ‘Live At Dominoes’, a sun-kissed piece of filter house that mines through the history of disco, from Boney M right up to Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter. This leads into the peaceful closer, ‘Extra Kings’. Far fewer fresh samples appear here, instead recycling samples and motifs from previous tracks, such as the reprising of the opening track’s sentiment or the placating flute-and-string combo from ‘Summer Crane’. The group also foreshadow ‘Tonight’ in the tracks leading up to it much the same way, and by using the same source material several times over, the Avalanches construct a universe that feels like it lives and breathes even after the needle is lifted.
The Grey Album and The Battle to Plunder
It’s important to note how difficult it is to create a record like this. Logistically, the sample clearances needed to allow these albums to become available is a near-impossible task, so much so that Since I Left You has never seen a full physical pressing that includes every intended sample, save for the original Australian CD (the version that is covered in this piece). The group’s follow up to that debut was one of the most infamous album gulfs in music, and a multitude of reasons added up to 16 years of waiting. For one, it took until 2005 for them to even begin to produce the record, and while all bands need breaks from music and each other, the nature of how they make music is especially exhausting. A documentary by ABC Australia shows the labour being put into collecting and finding records, listening to each and every one, editing and looping them through computers, all in harmony over the span of years. Sample clearances surely make up a sizable portion of the time, as is filtering all the material through the lens of a singular concept. To put so many samples together cohesively is one thing, but these records and songs have narratives to them, too, like the very best electronic and dance music. Originally, the idea for the second Avalanches LP was a take on “ambient world music”, but this quickly shifted directions, each new overhaul requiring more ideas, more samples. Likely due to this almost asinine process, the group lost three of its six members along the way, but in 2016, they gave the world Wildflower, a sun-drenched record that pulls heavily from the tsunami of neo-psychedelia from which their native Australia is the epicentre.
However, the idea of sampling still continues to be a contested issue today as it has historically, and is sometimes the biggest hurdle is that acceptance, despite the net positive outcome.
“There’s been times when we’ve encountered resistance and broken through that resistance. And then there’s times where we’re not able to make it happen. And the unfortunate thing about that is, not only does my music not get out there, but nobody will ever have a chance, through my music, to rediscover the original artist.”
When producer Danger Mouse mixed the acapella version of JAY-Z’s Black Album with samples from The Beatles’ White Album, thus christening the Grey Album, the project garnered praise from both Jay and the two remaining members of the Beatles, Paul and Ringo. However, he received a cease and desist letter from EMI, who maintain a tight grasp on the Beatles catalogue. Mouse complied and stopped distributing his work, but sites like downhillbattle.org countered that the record “honors both the Beatles and JAY-Z”, and that EMI has “shown zero flexibility and not a glimmer of interest in the artistic significance of this work.” This website would go on to conduct a monumental defiance of the major label’s wishes in what was known as “Grey Tuesday”, which saw them and many other sites hosting the album, to which it was downloaded over 100,000 times - enough to top the Billboard 200 that day. Ultimately, the corporates have the power over the use of this material and continues to be an obstacle for legitimate plunderphonics artists, even those that release their work for free.
To read more on Danger Mouse’s Grey Album, go to KEYMAG’s feature piece on the story here.
It should be noted that John Oswald himself received cease and desist letters for that original Plunderphonic project, but in line with the spirit of the practise, he said of it, “It seemed like a risk. It seemed like a risk worth taking.”
Despite this, the practice is still pulsating with fresh ideas. Reaching into the present day, mashup culture and its artists such as Soulwax’s “2manydjs” project are keeping plunderphonics alive with their dancefloor-driven works of miscellany. It has even distilled into internet-made genres, namely the cyberpunk satire of consumer culture and smooth jazz that is vaporwave. With derivative ideas being repurposed again and again in popular music, plunderphonic artists undercut the cycle, and sometimes inadvertently become more original than their peers.