In His Own Shadow
Can you blame DJ Shadow to be for being caught in his own shadow? He made his reputation doing sound-collage sample-crazy masterpieces. And now he plays concerts where he plays those collage masterpieces faithfully for his fans.
But the issue is that he hasn’t invoked the spirit of his work. The whole idea is that music is fluid and any style can be sampled and reorganized into something else entirely. DJ Shadow even said it himself in a monologue…it doesn’t matter what genre of music it is, all that matters is quality. So to play a set with the same samples we know and love just feels static, concrete, and even boring.
Now DJ Shadow can still put on a great show, but Sunday night at the Avalon, it was two modes…greatest hits and new album promotion. And with the exception of the encore, most of the set felt a bit canned. Whatever improvisation there was, it seemed to fit within a predetermined mold. The give-away was the carefully coordinated video displays, which reflected the music precisely.
Granted I understand his new tour is just beginning so there may have been a desire to run the show “pure”, but I hope the man hasn’t lost inspiration in his live set. No matter the quality of the albums he puts out, that would be the real tragedy.
Actually, there were moments of inspiration. At one point, Shadow invited Chris James of Stateless to do two songs from the new album. The first was like a Chris Martin song and the second was a Thom Yorke song. No matter, the sight of a DJ and an indie rock singer together was sublime in and of itself.
And Shadow started his encore with ”Triplicate” from the new album The Outsider, which uses John Cage’s In a Landscape, which I blogged only two days earlier. However, the version he used was arranged for a harp. Pretty sweet..to me at least. Strangely there are apparently multiple versions of the album swirling around. In one version, Cage is pretty much left alone…which I think is the final version of the album. In another, it is used in a song called “What Have I Done” in heavy combination, which may have been an earlier version (it cuts off suddenly at 2:09).
Triplicate/Something Happened That Day (mp3) - DJ Shadow Buy
What Have I Done (mp3) - DJ Shadow
