‘Seminal’ is overused when discussing albums, but for debut, ‘Endtroducing…..’, it’s both apt and inadequate. Its impact was immediate (Radiohead famously copied his methods for the drums on ‘Airbag’, the opening track of ‘OK Computer’) and enduring, with generations of hip hop artists tracing a stylistic lineage to Shadow’s landmark record.

To mark its 30th anniversary, ‘Endtroducing…..’ takes centre stage in a reissue campaign which extensively explores Shadow’s work dubbed A Lifetime of Vinyl Culture, as well as an accompanying tour. For , aka , it all began in his early days on the legendary label.

“I intended to demonstrate to everybody, including non-hip hop people, that the sampler was a legitimate instrument,” says Shadow today, speaking to CLASH. “That was at the forefront of the inherent goals with the record, to push that narrative forward. You can you can make songs that have emotion, even with it being instrumental.”

The final album took longer than planned, with Shadow forced back to square one when his early material proved too strong. “The first thing was ‘Influx’, then ‘Lost and Found’, which was a double A-side with DJ Krush. ‘What Does Your Soul Look Like’ was the third salvo. It was 32 and a half minutes’ worth of what was intended to be my first album. Then Mo’ Wax was like, “We really think you should drop another single and we’d love to put this out as a single.” I scratched my head and was like, “But it took six months to make this, and it’s 32 minutes.” That just seemed daft to me. But ultimately, I trusted them, and it was the right call in terms of stepping up the critical support. At that time, NME and Melody Maker were still major tastemakers… and so that all worked, but the net effect was that I had to start all over.”

Shadow made the album using just three pieces of equipment, a now-legendary limitation that was never intentional. “There was really no thought of using another instrument other than my MPC (Sampler), simply because I didn’t have access to anything else.”

“The MPC spoke to the methodology of the way I made music better than like a rack mount sampler. I wanted to use something different because it was unproven and there was no chatter about it. Nobody had established themselves on that instrument within hip-hop yet.”

‘Endtroducing…..’ was widely recognised as the first album made entirely from samples, a distinction Shadow himself was unaware of at the time. “It was my intention for it to be entirely sample-based, but it never dawned on me that it would be considered the first sample-based album because I grew up on sample-based music. That was not something that ever entered my mind until people started saying that to me after the record was out.”

Starting from scratch meant the album took around two years to complete, though Shadow remains understandably vague on the exact timeline. “It’s a little hard to qualify, simply because the seeds of a song like ‘Midnight’ go back to late ‘93/early ‘94. I didn’t touch it for a year and then I was doing all these other projects, whether for Soul Sides, the hip hop label I was part of, or other miscellaneous things I would do for James (Lavelle), like remixes for DJ Krush, then all the touring as well. I would have two months to work on it and then I’d get called away for two months.”

“It wasn’t like now, where I’ll sit and just work on an album from beginning to end and be able to say I started on this date and finished on this date. I was finishing school (and) moving house. Life when you’re in your early/mid-twenties is very different than when you’re established. You’ve sort of figured out all those things.”

Despite its hip-hop roots, ‘Endtroducing…..’ is devoid of rappers or singers and notably downtempo by the genre’s standards. “The sampling that people like were doing at the time had so much character and so much personality,” Shadow explains of his influences. “It wasn’t just about a head nodding beat; it was about conveying the humour or soulfulness. When you listen to the A Tribe Called Quest stuff of the era, it’s so soulful, so deep and rich. That was something that hadn’t been done in hip hop. I always use as the perfect example of conveying emotion through sampling and that emotion being rage, specifically, ‘It Takes a Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back’, ‘Fear of a Black Planet’, records like that. The sampling is so perfectly geared towards the emotion that Chuck D is putting into the lyrics. It’s such a perfect accompaniment.”

“So I went, “OK, these guys mastered that.” I just wanted to be true to myself and my own surroundings and try to offer a different voice. I’ve seen it written as ‘suburban longing’ or loneliness, which gives the album that intimate, chill feel. The fact that I also made the record on headphones adds to that, because at no point was I thinking to myself, this beat has got to really hit hard so it sounds good in the club. It was just what sounds good in my head.”

The album’s title has often puzzled listeners, given that it was Shadow’s debut, a point he’s happy to clarify: “There was a thread: The legitimate mix for ‘Zimbabwe Legit’, on a label called Hollywood BASIC, was the song that I had made. It was the template for the sound James was looking for, for Mo’ Wax. He didn’t want to do acid jazz anymore. He wanted to delve into hip-hop, but he didn’t want to pretend to be a competitor to Music of Life or Cold Sweat or some of the other UK rap labels that were out at the time. He heard that record of mine, which came out in ’92, maybe late ’91, way later at a gig.”

“When I made my first single for him, we both used that as a reference point, in terms of what the record was going to be. It was going to be ambitious, freewheeling, soulful, downtempo. We talked about all hallmarks for the sound. was a total outlier, then ‘What Does Your Soul Look Like’ was a revisit of those same themes. By the time I got to the album it was the last statement on that sound, in my mind. Also being conscious that most music consumers discover an artist only on their first album, they don’t really buy singles in the same way, so it’s an introduction for a large number of people. But it was also the end of the list of imperatives that James and I had agreed to, in terms of what I’d be doing on the label.”

Shadow is currently touring the US with a set built entirely around ‘Endtroducing…..’, a surprising first, given the album’s status. But there are good reasons why many of its tracks have remained unplayed live until now, as he explains: “In the mid-‘90s there really wasn’t this solo DJ show template that exists now. All the festivals and venues were geared towards rock bands. There was some hip-hop and other genres, but the idea of a DJ on stage without an MC or any vocalist was just not done. If you were a DJ, you were in clubs playing dance music in a DJ booth somewhere.”

“The second reason was; even if I had wanted to do it 20 years ago, five years ago, even, I didn’t have multi-tracks. The way the album was made, there’s no true master tape. As a result, there’s never really been stems. In other words, it’s wanted the drums from this track or the piano sample from this track. That’s not something that I was able to do until very recently because I finally found the original MPC. Shortly afterwards, I found the original floppy discs that the samples were recorded on. I spent six months dumping the samples down, cleaning them up, rebuilding the original songs from the ground up, and then only at that point, putting the live version of the show together.”

“I had to rebuild the stems using the original, taking the original samples off the MPC one by one, rebuilding them. The whole process took about six months. I had been lamenting the fact that there were no multis or stems for a long time. I hadn’t seen my MPC, the original sampler that I used, in 20 years. It was just buried in storage. I wasn’t entirely sure even whether I still had it, because I had loaned it out to a few friends and I was pretty sure I got it back. Then I remembered loaning it to an exhibition that Island Records did for their 50th anniversary in 2009. I hadn’t remembered seeing it since then and then found it, but I thought it was broken. A friend of mine refurbished it and I was able to even put discs in it again and fire it back up.”

“The show is the show. I more or less follow the sequence of the album. The only part I was worried about was whether I was going to find enough interesting ways to mess with the music so that I was interested but not go so far that the audience felt that I was tampering too much or not honouring the original. It was just trying to find that middle ground. That’s the part I was mainly worried about was: are our fans going to kind of understand the liberties that I’m taking?”

“At the same time, are they going to recognise this specialness of the parts that are left alone, because they are truly rebuilt. It may sound silly, but I think it’s totally fine that I was learning on the fly and that I was untrained. I don’t regret that the album sounds the way it does, but by the same token, I also don’t think there’s anything wrong with cleaning up the print. I’m not adding superfluous scenes of Jabba the Hutt getting his tail stepped on. This isn’t about trying to rewrite the album, it’s more like, ‘I didn’t know that you shouldn’t put a reverb wash across the entire track if you wanted reverb in 1995. Maybe just put it on the actual sound that you want affected rather than the entire track.’ Just silly things like that. I always feel it’s a bit facile to pretend that you haven’t learned all these things in 30 years of making music. I’m really happy with the middle ground that was struck and seemingly, so far, fans are as well.”

The tour culminates in London just before Christmas, with a special show at the Barbican Centre with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, although given his busy schedule, Shadow can’t see that far ahead. “I won’t be able to pivot to working on it until I return in a few weeks… it’s going to be a faithful reimagining of the album. One thing we’ve agreed we don’t want to do is just have strings playing over pre-programmed tracks. A lot of people do these things. That’s our goal, and we’ll see how close we can get to that.”

After releasing a sequel to landmark single ‘Nobody Speak’ earlier in the year (“It was just something I felt I wanted to do… In terms of where we’re at, as a society, there’s so much to talk about”), the next collection in the reissue campaign is ‘Preemptive Strike’, a compilation of his Mo ‘Wax singles up to 1997. After a lifetime looking forward, it seems that Davis has enjoyed revisiting his past: “The planning and the process of all this really started immediately after I finished ‘Action Adventure’. I felt innately that it was the right time for me to revisit my own catalogue and give everything a fresh context. The archival process is one you have to tend to. I’m 54 years old; I don’t want to wait until I’m 74. This is a good time to do all these things and tell all these stories.”

“I want to do it because it feels good, and it reminds me that I’ve got a pretty good rein on all the stories, so what wait until you start to forget everything? Let’s just give people some of what I know they want. Every artist that I respect, that’s been around for a long time – and I’m not comparing myself at all – but at certain points it’s helpful to fans. It’s a retrospective, like artists in a gallery, and I think it’s important. I’ve been notoriously head down, looking forward for pretty much my whole career. At a certain point, you want people to understand that you’re not being contrary or spiteful, it’s just I find looking forward more artistically rewarding.”

“The phase I’m in now will probably continue for another two years, I’d imagine. I have more up my sleeve and there’s more things coming. I always sit there and love to plan. I had so many things I wanted to do, with so many components to this reissue campaign, I’ll probably only get to a fourth of them, but it’s still a hell of a lot. As long as I’m proud of everything every step of the way, that’s all that matters.”

‘Endtroducing’ 30th anniversary edition is out now. DJ Shadow will play London’s Barbican on December 18th.