DJ Shadow: Live 2010-10-31 Los Angeles (URB.COM)
This Halloween I didn’t go trick or treating nor did I costume up, I didn’t even give candy to children—instead, I went to check out one of my favorite DJ’s, the legendary DJ Shadow at the House of Blues on Sunset. Always skeptical when seeing DJs perform live as their ‘stage performance’ is never truly eventful, I embarked into this show with high hopes of creativity, originality, and entertainment. To my surprise (not really), Shadow delivered on all fronts with his inventive Shadowsphere apparatus and outstanding and thought-provoking visual accompaniment courtesy of longtime VJ collaborator, Ben Stokes. DJ Shadow, who introduced himself by walking out on stage waving to his fans following an energetic and headnodding performance by Quannum homie Pigeon John (pictures below performing in front of the Shadowsphere), he pointed to the decorative sphere of projectable surface as the lights dimmed and he entered inside to begin DJing from within.
The Shadowsphere had two projectors set up pointed at the it to blanket it with images, synced up and made to give it impressive effects that went along with the music for full audiovisual experience. For example, when in-the-mix Shadow played the great “Blood on the Motorway,” the sphere transformed into a basketball, a baseball, a soccer ball, with the backdrop the hardwood, the field and the pitch. The whole thing convincingly looked as if the sphere was non-stationary, moving through places and traversing distances. Shadow’s folks described it as follows:
Public Enemy had its Terrordrome — now DJ Shadow has his Shadowsphere.
This tour finds the legendary producer performing from within his Shadowsphere, a gigantic ball that serves as both command center for his bass-loving beat excursions and a 360-degree screen lit up with all sorts of elemental and electronic imagery. “It’s not just giant flat screens this time, it’s an orb in front of a back screen so now there’s two sets of visuals going on. It’s really effective and we’ve had a lot of fun with it,” says Shadow.
Coupled with the classic hip-hop aesthetic unique to DJ Shadow, he worked through many snippets of his recognizable tracks, entering the crux of his set with a non-vocal version of the anticipatory and ominous, “Building Steam with a Grain of Salt.” Setting the stage for what was to come, the Shadowsphere simultaneously underwent fast and mind-boggling changes, pointing to social issues (hate, racism, war), abstract patterns, and current events and everything inbetween all while being rhythmically synchronized to Shadow’s fast cuts and screws, in a truly remarkable 1-to-1 matching of image and sound.
“Just listen to this! Just listen to this!” the speakers blared. Shadow transitions smoothly into “The Number Song,” with a discombobulating effect that sonically transformed into a drum and bass breakdown coupled with the entering of a completely new song from the forthcoming album, which Shadow personally introduced as “I Gotta Rock.” Going back and forth as to confirm to people that he was in fact inside the Shadowsphere, Shadow reconstructed The Pharcyde’s classic joint, “Passin’ Me By” which he had previously done during The Hard Sell tour with his SoCal partner-in-crime and compatriot Cut Chemist (who was in the building, he got a shout-out towards the end of the show). DJ Shadow performed Stem/Long Stem, and showed love to The Outsider with “Enuff” featuring Q-Tip and Lateef. Through his somewhat overwhelming and uncharacteristic DnB segues, Shadow entered into a fantastic rendition and reimagined take on “Walkie Talkie,” a personal favorite off of The Private Press.
With the crowd hyped up in the midst of all the lunacy emanating from Shadow’s decks inside of the spectral orb, he endtroduced into the famous and unforgettable “Organ Donor,” while playfully asking his audience, “are you guys familiar with this track?” Elaborating “Organ Donor” to its logical extreme, Shadow exclaimed, “Goddamn LA…it must be a holiday or something.” Now having the audience hanging onto his every noise, he introduced the track “Sad and Lonely (With Apologies to Kid Koala)” which marked a shift from his previous work on The Outsider to a more traditional Shadow aesthetic that was fed into well from “Organ Donor.” Thank God! Shortly after, Shadow fabricated a medley of tracks which, as far as I could tell, were composed of chunks of “High Noon,” “Transmission,” and the dopest of the dope, Dead Prez’s “Hip-Hop.”
Finally, Shadow concluded his show with a shoutout to the people in the building, the audience, and his fans for supporting him to do what he does. He concluded with a song that to me vaguely resembled “Midnight in a Perfect World” sans Gift of Gab vocals, and in a unified fashion ending with a destructive and thunderous assault on all the senses with a mix of tons of tracks, concluding to a mesmerized (perhaps numb) crowd and grand applause. Shadow delivered, the Shadowsphere is a fantastic concept and it works really well in introducing a less-boring and more engaging visual component to his performance work. It adds a layer of dimensionality that gives the music a fuller and more-complete representation, making it more of an event, and redefining the geometry of DJ performance. Note: There was also an official iPhone app that somehow connected to the performance in interesting ways, I didn’t embark down the mobile media route this time around though but post-show I grabbed the application and perused through it. It’s quite full-featured and made social the performance for fans and Twitter followers.
If you would like to catch DJ Shadow and his patented Shadowsphere on his 2011 Tour check out the dates over on the page on djshadow.com. I highly recommend it.
SOURCE
This Halloween I didn’t go trick or treating nor did I costume up, I didn’t even give candy to children—instead, I went to check out one of my favorite DJ’s, the legendary DJ Shadow at the House of Blues on Sunset. Always skeptical when seeing DJs perform live as their ‘stage performance’ is never truly eventful, I embarked into this show with high hopes of creativity, originality, and entertainment. To my surprise (not really), Shadow delivered on all fronts with his inventive Shadowsphere apparatus and outstanding and thought-provoking visual accompaniment courtesy of longtime VJ collaborator, Ben Stokes. DJ Shadow, who introduced himself by walking out on stage waving to his fans following an energetic and headnodding performance by Quannum homie Pigeon John (pictures below performing in front of the Shadowsphere), he pointed to the decorative sphere of projectable surface as the lights dimmed and he entered inside to begin DJing from within.
The Shadowsphere had two projectors set up pointed at the it to blanket it with images, synced up and made to give it impressive effects that went along with the music for full audiovisual experience. For example, when in-the-mix Shadow played the great “Blood on the Motorway,” the sphere transformed into a basketball, a baseball, a soccer ball, with the backdrop the hardwood, the field and the pitch. The whole thing convincingly looked as if the sphere was non-stationary, moving through places and traversing distances. Shadow’s folks described it as follows:
Public Enemy had its Terrordrome — now DJ Shadow has his Shadowsphere.
This tour finds the legendary producer performing from within his Shadowsphere, a gigantic ball that serves as both command center for his bass-loving beat excursions and a 360-degree screen lit up with all sorts of elemental and electronic imagery. “It’s not just giant flat screens this time, it’s an orb in front of a back screen so now there’s two sets of visuals going on. It’s really effective and we’ve had a lot of fun with it,” says Shadow.
Coupled with the classic hip-hop aesthetic unique to DJ Shadow, he worked through many snippets of his recognizable tracks, entering the crux of his set with a non-vocal version of the anticipatory and ominous, “Building Steam with a Grain of Salt.” Setting the stage for what was to come, the Shadowsphere simultaneously underwent fast and mind-boggling changes, pointing to social issues (hate, racism, war), abstract patterns, and current events and everything inbetween all while being rhythmically synchronized to Shadow’s fast cuts and screws, in a truly remarkable 1-to-1 matching of image and sound.
“Just listen to this! Just listen to this!” the speakers blared. Shadow transitions smoothly into “The Number Song,” with a discombobulating effect that sonically transformed into a drum and bass breakdown coupled with the entering of a completely new song from the forthcoming album, which Shadow personally introduced as “I Gotta Rock.” Going back and forth as to confirm to people that he was in fact inside the Shadowsphere, Shadow reconstructed The Pharcyde’s classic joint, “Passin’ Me By” which he had previously done during The Hard Sell tour with his SoCal partner-in-crime and compatriot Cut Chemist (who was in the building, he got a shout-out towards the end of the show). DJ Shadow performed Stem/Long Stem, and showed love to The Outsider with “Enuff” featuring Q-Tip and Lateef. Through his somewhat overwhelming and uncharacteristic DnB segues, Shadow entered into a fantastic rendition and reimagined take on “Walkie Talkie,” a personal favorite off of The Private Press.
With the crowd hyped up in the midst of all the lunacy emanating from Shadow’s decks inside of the spectral orb, he endtroduced into the famous and unforgettable “Organ Donor,” while playfully asking his audience, “are you guys familiar with this track?” Elaborating “Organ Donor” to its logical extreme, Shadow exclaimed, “Goddamn LA…it must be a holiday or something.” Now having the audience hanging onto his every noise, he introduced the track “Sad and Lonely (With Apologies to Kid Koala)” which marked a shift from his previous work on The Outsider to a more traditional Shadow aesthetic that was fed into well from “Organ Donor.” Thank God! Shortly after, Shadow fabricated a medley of tracks which, as far as I could tell, were composed of chunks of “High Noon,” “Transmission,” and the dopest of the dope, Dead Prez’s “Hip-Hop.”
Finally, Shadow concluded his show with a shoutout to the people in the building, the audience, and his fans for supporting him to do what he does. He concluded with a song that to me vaguely resembled “Midnight in a Perfect World” sans Gift of Gab vocals, and in a unified fashion ending with a destructive and thunderous assault on all the senses with a mix of tons of tracks, concluding to a mesmerized (perhaps numb) crowd and grand applause. Shadow delivered, the Shadowsphere is a fantastic concept and it works really well in introducing a less-boring and more engaging visual component to his performance work. It adds a layer of dimensionality that gives the music a fuller and more-complete representation, making it more of an event, and redefining the geometry of DJ performance. Note: There was also an official iPhone app that somehow connected to the performance in interesting ways, I didn’t embark down the mobile media route this time around though but post-show I grabbed the application and perused through it. It’s quite full-featured and made social the performance for fans and Twitter followers.
If you would like to catch DJ Shadow and his patented Shadowsphere on his 2011 Tour check out the dates over on the page on djshadow.com. I highly recommend it.
SOURCE