“In the ‘90s, I was eager to demonstrate that samples were a legitimate form of making music – I wanted to articulate that in as many ways as I could”: DJ Shadow on his original mission statement and why he no longer puts the MPC on a pedestal

DJ Shadow.

Since his 1996 debut, Endtroducing revolutionised - and legitimised - the notion of sample-based instrumental hip-hop production, DJ Shadow has been one of the world’s most celebrated crate-digging creatives. A singular talent, DJ Shadow's work proved that those dusty old records buried at the back of the record store shelf, or in your dad’s tatty old box, could just contain the raw materials of something new, and perhaps something extraordinary.

Sampling has, of course, moved on quite a bit since those foundational, vinyl-oriented days, but while there’s a wealth of cloud-synchronised platforms now offering you ready-to-go samples, for the purists it’s the artistry of corralling what you’d extracted with a classic Akai MPC that they still regard as ‘proper’ sampling.