Six decades, four countries, ten strangers who never met

Endtroducing came out September 16, 1996. We sit with it at Kiku the night before it turns thirty, front to back.

There is so much archived on DJ Shadow it gets overwhelming. UNKLE, the all 45s tours with Cut Chemist, a 1993 digging trip funded by the Austrian government.

Much has been said about B+ and his photographs of Shadow. He shot the cover in a Sacramento shop called Records in 1995. His book Ghostnotes is named after the unplayed sounds between beats, and he sequences photographs the way a DJ sequences records, until something appears that was in neither.

That is the part I want to talk about. Not the legend. The sound, and the strangers in it.

He could not afford turntables as a kid, so he learned on a busted belt drive, where you can do anything you want right until your hand lets go. I know that in my body. I had a Nikko direct drive and a JVC boombox. No mixer, no second deck. I put a tape on and scratched along with headphones on. We were both handed a limit and built a technique from it.

Take Midnight in a Perfect World, his best known track.

David Axelrod gives the piano, already sad in 1969. He did not manufacture that feeling, he recognised it. Meredith Monk gives the voice, wordless. He has said lyrics feel confining and too specific, so Monk hands him a human with no subject attached.

Organized Konfusion, A Tribe Called Quest and Akinyele are stabs, the only thing tying it to hip hop when nothing else in it is. Pekka Pohjola, a Finnish prog record from 1974 that moves and resolves, gets flattened into a loop and held.

And a percussion instruction record. A man being interviewed about how to play drums, with no idea he was making music.

Six decades, four countries, ten strangers who never met.

The skill is not writing. It is knowing which strangers belong beside each other, and having the nerve to sit in it.

Thirty years on the Wednesday. We get there a day early.