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Doors: 8:00pmAges: 21+
Ticket Prices: $150 ADV // $165 DOS
For over 30 years, Josh Davis has expressed his passion, taste, and values through the music he creates as DJ Shadow. The name alone evokes a high watermark for instrumental hip-hop and composition. From his first masterpiece *Endtroducing...*, to the genre-hopping UNKLE release *Psyence Fiction*, to the otherworldly elegance of *The Private Press* and its iconic single “Six Days,” to his underrated Bay Area celebration *The Outsider*, his work in the ‘90s and 2000s is as essential as it is hard to pin down. In the 2010s, Shadow released the sprawling *The Less You Know, the Better*, with its muscular forays into rock music, and closed the decade with *The Mountain Will Fall* and *Our Pathetic Age*, both ambitious, risk-taking albums that featured collaborations with Run the Jewels, Nas, and De La Soul. If there’s a single red thread across his career, it's his restless ear, always searching to rescue some forgotten gem from the dustbin of music history or a fresh blast of sound from the cutting edge.
Shadow’s passion for collecting began as a young boy, enamored with comic books, baseball cards, 12-inch records, and songs captured to cassette from the radio in northern California. With great seriousness and love, he describes the second-hand transistor AM radio on which he first heard Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message” at 10 years old, or his mind-expanding encounter with Public Enemy’s “Rebel Without a Pause” and its howling saxophone. At the heart of DJ Shadow’s musical project is deep listening. “I’m always trying to please or impress the most advanced listener,” he says—the aficionado who respects the layers of synth that create a sound you can’t readily identify but makes you want to share the track with a friend.
The first sampled words on DJ Shadow’s forthcoming album *Action Adventure*, his seventh solo LP, are “all my records and tapes.” In fact, they’re some of the only words heard on what is almost an entirely instrumental release—a thesis statement for an album rooted in the drifting, destabilizing days of the COVID lockdown. *Action Adventure* is an inward-looking project, made by Shadow alone without collaborators. It tells the listener: “This is about my relationship to music. My life as a collector and curator. All my records and tapes, and no one else’s.” The result is the most exciting DJ Shadow LP in years.
In March 2020, Shadow narrowly escaped from the European tour for *Our Pathetic Age*, landing back home in the Bay Area as the world shut down. He watched his two teenage daughters endure homeschooling and tried to process his emotions about the tour being cut short. “It was a very intense time,” he recalls. For over a year, he couldn’t imagine making or even listening to new music. “It was as if the music coming out was tainted by the craziness we were living through. I needed to temporarily wallow in a bit of nostalgia.” Around this time, a friend directed Shadow to an eBay auction of 200 tapes recorded from a Baltimore-D.C. area mix station in the ‘80s. These mixes felt entirely unique in their blend of dance music, R&B, and early hip-hop, invigorating Shadow at a time when he desperately needed it.
Shadow began work on *Action Adventure* on January 1, 2022, and the early tracks pushed him further into his compositional bag. “I didn’t want to write music formatted for vocalists. I wanted to flex different energies,” he says. Though not classically trained, he asked himself questions like “Which chord progression feels natural? Which is least predictable?” and worked according to his own inner logic. His rule for the record was simple: no compromises. “I’m entering my fourth decade doing this—what do I want to represent? I know that I don’t want to only make beats for some vocalist who may not share my vision. I want this record to stand or fall on my own credentials.”
“Ozone Scraper” kicks off the album with big, propulsive drums. One of Shadow’s favorites, it’s an invitation to strap in for the deep listening experience he loves. Advanced listeners will marvel at the “special effects,” as Shadow puts it, used to create elusive synth noises. “You Played Me” is another standout, inspired by the eBay tapes. Shadow created a beat with crackling percussion and burbling synths reminiscent of classic ‘80s R&B. By chance, he found the perfect acapella from an obscure R&B 12-inch that changed the course of the album. “There are a thousand records sitting next to me that aren’t going to work; the right record got put on at the right moment to change the course of my album.”
The album has a cinematic quality, especially in its sequencing. The last quarter, from “Fleeting Youth” through “Reflecting Pool” and “Forever Changed,” is cathartic, ending on a triumphant note with “She’s Evolving,” a track that almost didn’t make the album. Initially, Shadow planned to end with a much sadder track but kept returning to “She’s Evolving” until it stuck. The title *Action Adventure* evokes the halcyon days of video store browsing, and fittingly, Shadow provides a crowd-pleasing ending. Of course, this is still a DJ Shadow album, so don’t mistake that for anything corny. This record is a mature, revitalizing release from a grandmaster of our time. “Rightly or wrongly, I’m not thinking about anybody’s musical wants or desires but my own,” he says.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
The Get Down, 680 SE 6th Ave,Portland,OR,United States
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