ENTRODUCING DJ SHADOW

"Everyday opinion sees in the shadow only the lack of light, if not light’s complete denial. In truth, however, the shadow is a manifest, though impenetrable, testimony to the concealed emitting of light. In keeping with this concept of shadow, we experience the incalculable as that which, withdrawn from representation, is nevertheless manifest in whatever is, pointing to Being, which remains concealed."

Martin Heidegger

"For the liminality of the Western nation is the shadow of its own finitude."

Homi Bhaba

DJ Shadow has given us the greatest movie of the 1990s. The strange thing, however, is that it comes in the form of a compact disc, and is best experienced with the eyes closed (preferably wearing headphones). His first album, Entroducing, is breathtakingly cinematic, taking the listener/viewer on a journey through an unprecedented aural landscape made up entirely from samples. The mixing studio thus becomes a giant loom on which he has woven the musical threads of the last four decades into an instant masterpiece.

Musicologist Jacques Attali tells us that "[f]or twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible" (Noise: 3). Entroducing seems to take this statement as the premise for an exploration of strangely familiar sonic landscapes; an exploration which creates as much as it discovers.

One of the first samples on the record is a velintroquil voice claiming that "it’s not really me . . . the music’s coming through me." There is no doubt that DJ Shadow (real name, Josh Davis) possesses the power to channel. One of his earliest tracks, In Flux, is a ten minute essay of the civil-rights movement, squeezing more urgent and celebratory passion into his personal interpretation than a team of historians. He is thus creating a new tradition: the aural history.

Something of a cult has sprung up around this album, although a better description would be a "community." I use this term in Jean-Luc Nancy’s sense – as an exposure to the other, to mortality, sharing and love. Like the sign in Melbourne’s Pelligrini’s Café – which claims no man is lonely while eating spaghetti – DJ Shadow affirms the holistic bond between artist and fan, fan and fan, self and world (hence his practice of incorporating the audience’s albums into his own mix). No doubt the listening experience is best savoured alone, and can lead to a spine-tingling solipsistic delirium, however it can also give rise to the desire to share . . . perhaps even convert.

Such initiates proclaim DJ Shadow the most important artist of our times, in any medium, because he works in all. The world is his orchestra, and his compositions are no less "original" for being composed of previous elements (hence the misnomer of "the found sound"). Attali sums it up beautifully when he states that music can represent

a shred of utopia to decipher, information in negative, a collective memory allowing those who hear it to record their own personalized, specified, modeled meanings, affirmed in time with the beat – a collective memory of order and genealogies, the repository of the word and the social score. (Noise: 9)

The works of DJ Shadow thus corresponds to what Attali identifies as "composition," a kind of post-alienated harbinger of the future.

DJ Shadow does not use a synthesizer, he is a synthesizer – a cultural node sifting through the detritus and dejecta of postmodern America and turning it into ‘solid gold.’ This is a ‘meta’ version of the Situationist strategy of detournment and bricolage, no less political for its aesthetic aspirations. It uses technology to valorize the organic, and in doing so enacts Heidegger’s elusive point that the essence of technology is nothing technological. It is a revealing.

Entroducing, as its name suggests, is a circular text. It represents an artist greeting the public sphere at the point of exit, into the privacy of singular vision. ("Hello Goodbye," as the Beatles once said.) This album, if we can really call it that, spins in the knowledge of its own eternal return, as the looped sample at the beginning and end testify. It is a snake eating its tail, like history itself; a musical mise en abime. While this in itself is nothing new (as if I’m trying to establish its novelty!), the epiphany DJ Shadow relentlessly produces is a confirmation of what Giorgio Agamben calls "the coming community," the (re)presentation to its members of the mortal truth.

Entroducing resists the narrative of transcendent communion associated with most modern music because it flaunts its own metaphysical surplus. It completes itself through unraveling, like Ariadne’s thread. Frustratingly coherent and reassuringly oblique, this composition plays itself out in that aesthetic space beyond the spectacle, beyond even comprehension itself. As Levinas has stated, "art’s image is the very event of obscuring, a descent into night, an invasion of the shadow."

Rock critic Greil Marcus believes that the track Stem evokes in the listener, "something profound about life." Having experienced this performed "live" myself in his home-town of San Francisco, I can vouch for this abstract affirmation. Even to my drug-free system, the entire arena became a crystal sphere with no centre or circumference, suspended neither externally nor internally, but in dialogue with both body and psyche. I found myself witness to a spatial and temporal conflation; a fusional phenomena which soon spun into an exfoliating vortex. To refer to Nancy again: "[Singularity] is linked to ecstasy: one could not properly say that the singular being is the subject of ecstasy, for ecstasy has no ‘subject’ – but one must say that ecstasy (community) happens to the singular being" (The Inoperative Community: 6-7).

Entroducing is thus a limit artifact: an ur-text which leads back to the end, and forward to the origin.

Some call his work pompous, but so was 2001. Irony has no place here, and that is something of a relief. Sure it isn't as innovative as the brilliant Squarepusher or Aphex Twin, but it is just as vital, looking more over its shoulder than toward the horizon. In this way DJ Shadow proves himself to be one of the world's great listeners.

Plato believed that everything in this world is merely the shadow of its ideal form. DJ Shadow has obviously taken this dictum to heart, seeing it as a challenge, rather than a metaphysical rule. He takes the pulse of the modern world and finds it wanting. He seems to instinctively appreciate Emmanuel Levinas’ insight that "one might say that being beats, that it essentially is in the beating, indeed, in the e-motion of its own heart: being-nothingness-becoming, as an infinite pulsation" (in ibid.: 88).

Dominic Pettman