DJ Shadow released his 7th studio album Action Adventure on Oct. 27, 2023. This marked his first album in nearly 4 years and his first fully instrumental album since Entroducing….. — all with no collaborations or features. Carbon Sound caught up with DJ Shadow ahead of his Action Adventure tour stop at First Avenue in Minneapolis on Tuesday Jan. 30.

John Kueppers 

Hello, I am John from Carbon Sound. And I have the distinct honor and privilege of sitting down here with DJ Shadow. DJ Shadow has released Action Adventure that came out in October of 2023. He's here now just about two weeks into his Action Adventure Tour. How do you feel?

DJ Shadow 

It's good to be back, it's been a minute. It's been like, over seven years, I think, since I was last here.

John Kueppers 

There are some things that I just kind of want to hop in right when it comes to Action Adventure. And there may be some buzzwords that I use that have kind of been used a lot for this album. So just like a forewarning there, but one that does stick out to me is nostalgia. And this idea that a lot of the conception of this album came from you buying those '80s mixtapes and then there's also this resurgence of comic books that kind of like crept into the album in different and really cool ways. But you've been on record also kind of saying that nostalgia can be seductive and corrupting in some ways. So I'm just curious, like, what is your perspective on nostalgia in music making, and what place it holds?

DJ Shadow 

It has to be honest. In other words, if you rewind about five years, in 2019, I put out a double album. It's my first double album. One disc was all instrumental compositions, the other disc had all vocals, you know, but not like the instrumentals were instrumental versions of the vocal tracks, it was two distinctly different sets of music. And I had felt like I had been building up to that. And then unfortunately, like three months later, COVID hit, and I had to stop -- I was only able to do I think, seven shows overseas. And I was -- I had, like 100 shows ready to, you know, be booked and everything. So I think like everybody, I just was sitting at home trying to figure out what was happening. My daughters were, you know, in their sophomore and junior years of high school, and we're just as a family unit trying to navigate this, all this information and all this new territory that we were all in. And I just didn't feel like making music for a long time. I just didn't. And I'm a big believer that if you sit down to create, and you're not in a good headspace, to manifest something positive, then what you make is going to be something that I can't trust. You know what I mean? Something that I can't rely on to really speak for me and my true intentions. So, I just didn't want to make music for a long time. And I was feeling a certain way, obviously, about how it went down with that big album.

And it really wasn't until like a year and a half into that whole thing, when I basically was tipped off to this big collection on eBay of tapes that this guy had recorded off the radio in the Baltimore area, in '84 '85 '86, that kind of area. And I was really curious to hear what these mixes sounded like from Baltimore. Literally, it was just a thing where I kind of put some bid thinking I probably won't win. And then I ended up winning for the minimum bid. And the tapes all came and I was kind of interacting a little bit with the seller, and he was like, 'I hope you enjoy these, I, you know, put a lot of hours and time into this. And I love listening to them, but it's time for them to find another home.' And I really didn't think much of it, and I put a tape in and was just immediately transported to this really, really fun time. The group of individuals that made the mix, ended up forming a group called Numarx. And I know I'm getting long winded now, but Numarx ended up writing a song called 'Girl You Know It's True,' which was covered by a European group, and ended up being the Milli Vanilli hit. And some of the guys from Numarx in the industry. One of them was running Def Jam for a while. So rewind back to 1984, and they're just super enthusiastic teenagers basically. And they put so much energy into these mixes, it just was infectious. And I was listening to them and just, it's almost like an alternative universe where all these records I hadn't heard in a super long time, were being cut up and scratched in a way that I just couldn't have imagined. They did a lot of little bedroom edits, kind of Latin Rascals style, which was really really interesting as well, because nobody on the west coast was doing that, those type of mixes at that time. So bottom line is I found a way back into a pure love of music via these tapes and via this energy. And also what was cool, was like almost all mix shows in the mid '80s, it was really difficult to get away with playing like an hour of straight rap music. You always had to kind of segue into other types of R&B. So I ended up kind of rediscovering a lot of R&B records I hadn't heard really since then. And some of which I had never heard. So, I mean, it directly ended up influencing one song on my album called 'You Played Me.'

There's a song called Witches Vs. Warlocks on the record, and I, I was never really happy with the title. Just in my mind, I just imagined otherworldly beings, you know, fighting on some plane, not airplane, but like, you know, another plane of existence. And you know, whether it's 10,000 years ago, or 10,000 years from now, I wasn't sure. But that that's what I had in my head. And once that started to take shape, I went okay, well, then I want it to sound almost like they're casting spells against each other. And you start putting that into the sound design of the production and stuff. So yeah, I mean, coming up with a title or coming up with, okay, this is what this song is trying to say. For me, that's the only way I can ever finish anything.

John Kueppers 

And it's interesting that you bring up Witches Vs. Warlocks because there's this comparison you've made to DJing and making music sometimes and making seamless transitions to special effects in movies. Have you always seen that parallel? Or when did that become evident to you?

DJ Shadow 

I mean, I'm a kid of those movies. You know what I mean? I was five when Star Wars came out. Like, a lot of things that we now see every day were created for these films, or during the process of making these films. And then also, there was a TV special in 1980 called SFX that Mark Hamill hosted, and it literally showed you how they made the sounds in the movie. And I think we are all conditioned now to just think, oh, it's a synthesizer, or it's a keyboard or whatever computer. But literally, they in one shot in the special, it had these guys out with a field recorder, and they were striking garage door springs with a wrench. And that's how they got those laser sounds that we all know. So it wasn't any kind of computer trickery or anything. It was just pure imagination, like, oh, that's how you do that. And it was influential for me because I started thinking, well, there was kind of a DIY component to it. And it didn't suddenly seem so difficult to imagine that someone like me could actually, you know, make these sounds. So it was -- as a young kid, it stood out. And when I listen to sound design in contemporary electronic music, whether it's like dubstep or trap or whatever, when I hear something that's really good, just like in the old days, when I'd hear a really inventive scratch pattern or something, it brings me back to that excitement I felt as a kid when I was looking at and hearing something brand new. So that's what I like as well about music, is I like the emotional component and the spiritual component. But I also sometimes like to flex, just really going in on complicated programming or complicated sound design to try to put something on a record that literally has never been heard before.

John Kueppers 

Right, and there's so much excitement that comes with that. And kind of harping on what you had said about excitement as a kid, I think something that -- work you've done that reflects that is also DJ Hero. Just knowing that you had a hand in ideation of DJ Hero, what aspects of DJ culture were important for you to include in that game? And was there anything you feel like you had to fight for in the making of that game to include?

 DJ Shadow 

Hmm. By the time they reached out to me, they had Grandmaster Flash on board. And obviously, that would have been my first suggestion is like, well, you got to have somebody like Flash, like, representing the game. You got to get the founding fathers on board. And then I think from there, it was things like okay, well, I remember having a conversation at Activision where -- or, yeah, I guess it was at Activision -- where I was like, okay, well, what sounds are we going to be scratching? I was like, you better go start trying to license some of these classic scratch sounds. So I mean, it was really just my job initially, to just kind of be a sounding board and like, 'have you thought about this? Have you thought about that?' And then later, it came in to more gameplay things like, what am I allowed to do in the mixes that I turned in? How are they going to be reflected in terms of gameplay? Could I be scratching two different -- can I stack scratches, like in the mix? I wanted it to sound good, just as a four-minute piece of music. I didn't want it to just sound like chaos. But basically what I did is I turned in the mashup, as if a player did nothing, and then the mash up as if the player got 100% and executed all the moves. So then from that they could kind of send the audio accordingly, you know in stems based on the gameplay.

 John Kueppers 

Well, DJ Shadow, the pleasure is all ours. I'm very grateful for you being here today. I'm very grateful for you playing on this amazing Action Adventure Tour. I wish you the best and thank you again for being here today.

 DJ Shadow 

Yeah, thank you. Appreciate it.