Various: How We Spent Out Summer Vacation
While touring the west coast of the US for three weeks, we visited the DJ Shadow office on Monday September 22.
We didn’t really prepare ourselves on what to tell or ask. Nevertheless, we had a chat with DJ Shadow himself about his music, the fans, what he is up to now and more.
First off, we got a short tour through the djshadow.com office, which was cool. Awesome to see all this vinyl, cd's and other goodness from the web store lying there, waiting to be sent to the music fans. Got to pick stuff from the stock as well; mainly all the recent handmade releases (such as the instrumental version of 'The Outsider').
After that, we talked about various stuff; the focus more or less was on the people he had worked with back in the day, such as Futura (who created many album covers for James Lavelle’s Mo’wax label) and more of those guys who started the street culture/fashion back in the 90's. Also, all the physical releases from the official DJ Shadow discography were at the office. Shadow spent a lot of time going through all them to make the discography as complete as possible. He picked some special releases from the pile and told us something about that particular release. For example, we got to see a copy of a magazine that had the Celestial Annihilation 12” with it for free. Also Shadow told that even he doesn’t have all releases himself. The Japanese release of Melodica (Blackalicious) for example, is really hard to find. We remarked that it seems that people don’t put that much time in creating album covers and sleeves anymore.
We informed Shadow on some things as well; A cool “did you know that…” is for example, that Strictly Kev from DJ Food (http://www.djfood.org) who made the awesome “Press Cuttings” mix of The Private Press, was pleasantly surprised by seeing his mix added to the official discography. Shadow didn’t know that. What he also didn’t know, was that there are four original copies of this mix; Shadow has one, we at Solesides have one and Kev has the other two. Furthermore, we informed Shadow on what people think of the new djshadow.com and the web store. It’s really cool to see and hear that everyone is positive about it all; Making the rare releases and live performances available on djshadow.com is mainly about avoiding any new bootlegs. Shadow agreed 100% on what we at Solesides already said about this: "finally, there's a solid base for not-so-die-hard-fans to get this rarities" - He also added that the rare live recordings available directly from djshadow.com, are of (slightly) better sound quality than the ones floating around on the web. This is because Shadow went through the recordings and edited parts to make it all sound better.
We got to mention that the DJ Shadow samples pages are still online; you have to register to the Solesides messageboards in order to check the pages out, though. It was nice to see that Shadow immediately mentioned John Book. John hosted the samples pages for quite a while. John is now doing his music and music reviews over at http://www.thisisbooksmusic.com/ - Also, Shadow started talking about Mike Roeder, who hosted the first “official” DJ Shadow website over at endtroducing.com. After closing down endtroducing.com, Mike Roeder sent us all the content from endtroducing.com. You can find links to the archives on the http://www.solesides.com main page.
Mike Roeder is now doing his music blog at http://www.playbsides.com. Other things that we knew to tell Shadow: Gift of Gab is releasing his second solo album called “Escape 2 Mars” in October. And Lyrics Born had become a father of a son(on which Shadow replied “no wonder I haven’t heard anything from him for days – He asked me for a beat last week…” ).
Finally, we asked Shadow what he is up to now. We didn’t try really hard to get a lot of information, but we can assure you the following:
- New music is in the making. Shadow is working hard every day. If it’s going to be an album, than that’s nice. But it’s not sure how things will be released just yet. Perhaps as portions (a couple of EP’s), since releasing a full album doesn’t really make sense nowadays (if you release a new album, people talk about it for a week or two and after that, it’s forgotten about).
- There's lots of material for a new DVD. Things have to be really sorted out first, though; it's a big pile of videotapes. Also, it's a bit too soon (for various reasons) for a new DVD after The Hard sell. Dean Fernando (Dinobullet), who filmed most of the material during DJ Shadow’s tour for The Outsider and The Hard Sell, will be going through the video-material very soon. So there is something in the can, but don’t expect it soon.
- There might be a tour in 2010
Be sure to keep checking http://www.solesides.com for more updates. Our tweets can be found at http://www.twitter.com/solesides - DJ Shadow can be found at http://www.twitter.com/djshadow (Since, he’s mentioning The Minutemen/Mike Watts DVD, Lexicon Devil and has worked with Jello Biafra, you’ll find out that he’s into the 70s-80s punk scene and DIY mentality at the moment).
Many thanks to Mike and Josh for this awesome Monday afternoon. We’re looking forward to all things djshadow coming our way.
While touring the west coast of the US for three weeks, we visited the DJ Shadow office on Monday September 22.
We didn’t really prepare ourselves on what to tell or ask. Nevertheless, we had a chat with DJ Shadow himself about his music, the fans, what he is up to now and more.
First off, we got a short tour through the djshadow.com office, which was cool. Awesome to see all this vinyl, cd's and other goodness from the web store lying there, waiting to be sent to the music fans. Got to pick stuff from the stock as well; mainly all the recent handmade releases (such as the instrumental version of 'The Outsider').
After that, we talked about various stuff; the focus more or less was on the people he had worked with back in the day, such as Futura (who created many album covers for James Lavelle’s Mo’wax label) and more of those guys who started the street culture/fashion back in the 90's. Also, all the physical releases from the official DJ Shadow discography were at the office. Shadow spent a lot of time going through all them to make the discography as complete as possible. He picked some special releases from the pile and told us something about that particular release. For example, we got to see a copy of a magazine that had the Celestial Annihilation 12” with it for free. Also Shadow told that even he doesn’t have all releases himself. The Japanese release of Melodica (Blackalicious) for example, is really hard to find. We remarked that it seems that people don’t put that much time in creating album covers and sleeves anymore.
We informed Shadow on some things as well; A cool “did you know that…” is for example, that Strictly Kev from DJ Food (http://www.djfood.org) who made the awesome “Press Cuttings” mix of The Private Press, was pleasantly surprised by seeing his mix added to the official discography. Shadow didn’t know that. What he also didn’t know, was that there are four original copies of this mix; Shadow has one, we at Solesides have one and Kev has the other two. Furthermore, we informed Shadow on what people think of the new djshadow.com and the web store. It’s really cool to see and hear that everyone is positive about it all; Making the rare releases and live performances available on djshadow.com is mainly about avoiding any new bootlegs. Shadow agreed 100% on what we at Solesides already said about this: "finally, there's a solid base for not-so-die-hard-fans to get this rarities" - He also added that the rare live recordings available directly from djshadow.com, are of (slightly) better sound quality than the ones floating around on the web. This is because Shadow went through the recordings and edited parts to make it all sound better.
We got to mention that the DJ Shadow samples pages are still online; you have to register to the Solesides messageboards in order to check the pages out, though. It was nice to see that Shadow immediately mentioned John Book. John hosted the samples pages for quite a while. John is now doing his music and music reviews over at http://www.thisisbooksmusic.com/ - Also, Shadow started talking about Mike Roeder, who hosted the first “official” DJ Shadow website over at endtroducing.com. After closing down endtroducing.com, Mike Roeder sent us all the content from endtroducing.com. You can find links to the archives on the http://www.solesides.com main page.
Mike Roeder is now doing his music blog at http://www.playbsides.com. Other things that we knew to tell Shadow: Gift of Gab is releasing his second solo album called “Escape 2 Mars” in October. And Lyrics Born had become a father of a son(on which Shadow replied “no wonder I haven’t heard anything from him for days – He asked me for a beat last week…” ).
Finally, we asked Shadow what he is up to now. We didn’t try really hard to get a lot of information, but we can assure you the following:
- New music is in the making. Shadow is working hard every day. If it’s going to be an album, than that’s nice. But it’s not sure how things will be released just yet. Perhaps as portions (a couple of EP’s), since releasing a full album doesn’t really make sense nowadays (if you release a new album, people talk about it for a week or two and after that, it’s forgotten about).
- There's lots of material for a new DVD. Things have to be really sorted out first, though; it's a big pile of videotapes. Also, it's a bit too soon (for various reasons) for a new DVD after The Hard sell. Dean Fernando (Dinobullet), who filmed most of the material during DJ Shadow’s tour for The Outsider and The Hard Sell, will be going through the video-material very soon. So there is something in the can, but don’t expect it soon.
- There might be a tour in 2010
- About some critisism; It's quite unique to have a really long career. In their career, most artists have highs and lows. That's often because the artists' mind is "already over here" and the listeners are "still over there" - sometimes both minds cross and that's a high.
Be sure to keep checking http://www.solesides.com for more updates. Our tweets can be found at http://www.twitter.com/solesides - DJ Shadow can be found at http://www.twitter.com/djshadow (Since, he’s mentioning The Minutemen/Mike Watts DVD, Lexicon Devil and has worked with Jello Biafra, you’ll find out that he’s into the 70s-80s punk scene and DIY mentality at the moment).
Many thanks to Mike and Josh for this awesome Monday afternoon. We’re looking forward to all things djshadow coming our way.