Making music in the shadows

He may want millions of us to buy his albums, but you won't find DJ Shadow playing the PR game, compromising his musical tastes . . . or dropping his pants for publicity, he tells JIM CARROLL

THIS INTERVIEW, says Josh Davis, is the first one he's done in several years. He was last in the publicity frame back in 2006, when he released his third album The Outsider. There have been a couple of mixtapes and tours since then, but DJ Shadow didn't go around talking them up.

“I just think I’ve become more independent from the traditional system,” he says. “It’s not the mid-1990s, when you had a team of people at Mo’ Wax working on your behalf and evangalising for your music. You have to do it on your own these days.”

The music, though, still preaches the gospel according to Shadow. You can hear traces of his approach in every new batch of producers who come this way, from deep dubstep scientists to the interplanetary sounds of Flying Lotus or Hudson Mohawke. What the quiet-spoken Californian achieved with his groundbreaking Endtroducingdebut back in 1996, an album of immense scale and scope, still has repurcussions today.

Davis feels he’s lucky that he doesn’t have to hawk Endtroducing around today. “I’m not the kind of artist where every form of promotion is going to work for me,” he explains. “The traditional wisdom is that you have to tweet every day or have a video blog once a week, but I don’t think that’s what the people who really like my music want me to be doing. I don’t think they care to know intimate details about my life, they just want me to get on with making some good music.”

Not, though, that Davis believes his music doesn’t deserve the widest audience possible. “Contrary to popular belief, I want my music to be heard by the masses. It’s an ancient way of thinking, but I would like to sell millions of records. There has to be a community of people willing to support what you do.”

But getting to those people can be difficult. “In the era we’re in at the moment, this hyper-communicative age with information at the touch of your fingers, it’s almost impossible to process it all. The question is how you get heard through that noise without playing yourself out. You could talk shit about someone, drop your pants, flash your tits if you’re a female, or all the pathetic stuff you see people doing to get attention.

“I find it all quite odd. It doesn’t suit me and it doesn’t suit my music. I can understand why people who make music that they are proud of and who want their music to stand the test of time find it hard to stand out from the idiotic fray. I know that sounds judgmental and high and mighty, but I do care.”

But surely an established artist like Shadow doesn’t have those problems getting heard? “In this fickle music word we’re in, you’re only as good as the last burger you flipped,” he says. “We just saw that recently with Public Enemy who tried to raise a bunch of funds to record a new album through their fanbase and they fell well short. It was a good, honest try but it’s very difficult to get people to go out on a limb for you. It doesn’t matter if they are one of the most revolutionary acts of all time, but people still go ‘yeah but what have they done in the last 10 years?’ It’s like that.”

PERHAPS DAVIS ISthinking of the mixed reaction to his last album The Outsider, which featured rappers from San Francisco's hyphy hip-hop scene. "I was very surprised by some of that reaction. I would have thought that the history of how I think of music and my diverse influences would have spoken to people more and informed them more. But people were very surprised that there was so much rapping on it.

“You can never take it for granted that people are going to know who you are and where you’re coming from. I’d say 90 per cent of my fanbase don’t listen to hip-hop or haven’t growing up listening to rap, so I can’t assume that they’re going to really be up for those influences. But I can’t let that influence me either.”

For Shadow, music is unencumbered by time or place. “There’s only two or three people in my life that I theorise about music with. For us, music tends to be a lifelong pursuit and timing has no significance. I think too much emphasis is put on the next sound and what is happening at this moment or what’s the future.

“What it comes down to is that everything has been done. For those reasons, my listening spans all time frames. I can hear a drum’n’bass record from eight years ago and, in the purist sense, it’s out of date. But to me, I can hear they were onto something. . . That’s how I digest music and the more music you digest, the more you believe in. Someone was doing something in 1965 that fell flat on its face but yet in 1978, when it was done by someone else, everybody was ready for it.”

Davis has plans to release some new music later this year. “I still believe in the album as a format but I don’t think I can afford the luxury of four years between releases. Even though I’m only halfway through the next record, I plan on putting out some music in the next couple of months. It goes back to the Mo’ Wax days because I never thought anyone would really be interested in hearing a full album from me so I put out a single here, an EP there, a remix and then maybe an album.”

DJ Shadow plays Belfast’s Ulster Hall on July 4 and Dublin’s Tripod on July 5. See djshadow.com for more