When it comes to dance music, the "genius" tag is often tossed around like confetti outside a hilly chapel on a windy day. Any chancer who comes along with a satchel of samples or a bag of beats soon finds the garland of genius around his or her neck. Fatboy Slim? The guy who cuts out old soul hooks and fat hip-hop loops and pastes one onto the other and calls it his own? He's a genius! Puff Daddy? The hip-hopper with more people in his entourage than original ideas in his head? He's a genius, too! All these geniuses and all this mediocrity - it just doesn't add up.
The ones you should be watching out for are the quiet ones, and Josh Davis is one of these. Hailing from San Francisco and working as DJ Shadow, he has been responsible for three remarkable albums in the past couple of years. His 1996 debut, Entroducing, remains remarkable for the vast breadth of sounds and ideas it contained. An instrumental hip-hop album which sounded like nothing which had gone before or, indeed, has come this way since its release, it remains an impressive, benchmark release that few can even dream of imitating.
Last year saw an outing for Shadow as one half of UNKLE for the Psyence Fiction album alongside Mo Wax label-boss James Lavelle. As producer, Shadow coaxed superlative performances from such superstars as Thom Yorke (Radiohead), Richard Ashcroft (then The Verve) and Mike D (Beastie Boys), as well as from newcomers like Badly Drawn Boy and Alice Temple. That the album was a victim of its own hype had nothing to do with Shadow. Just listen to the beats and the bass and the drums and you'll hear what he brought to the party.
Now comes Quannam, his latest venture, and the album Spectrum, where he and his cohorts shine. It's funky, it's fresh and it's fun, a hip-hop album where MCs from Jurassic 5 and Company Flow come onboard to roll majestically over a rollercoaster of a succession of swish, smart, sharp beats and grooves. If you think hip-hop is still about a salary and not about reality, then you're in for something of a surprise. Spectrum is a state-of-the-hip-hop-nation address where roots are traced and future directions explored.
As a DJ and producer, Shadow is steeped in a hip-hop culture which has nothing to do with bragging and posturing. "Quannum is about hip-hop as we know it, hip-hop which is open to different influences and different sounds," he explains in quiet, measured tones. "We're not trying to canonise a certain sound per se; if anything, we're trying to fit in everything we hear. Growing up in the Bay Area, we listened to LA hip-hop, New York hip-hop, Houston hip-hop, Seattle hip-hop and Bay Area hip-hop. So, at any given time there's a little bit of all of those influences at work."
Spectrum gave Shadow the chance to do some creative recuperation after the UNKLE album. "I came off Psyence Fiction and I was a little worn-out on certain levels," he admits. "The rest of the crew had already begun the process of doing the album, so I came into the process with a load of ideas and just got started. Quannam and the Solesides label has always been a super-important outlet for me because it's a chance to do music which is a little closer to the type of music that I listen to. I just enjoy working with MCs from time to time."
Not that this means mixing with your Thom Yorkes and Richard Ashcrofts is a stressful task. "Either way, you're trying to get the best possible performance", he says nonchalantly. "I've had tough experiences with both vocalists and rappers where I wasn't getting what I was looking for. As far as personalities and tolerance to new ideas go, I haven't seen that much differences between Thom Yorke, say, and Divine Styler. They both had a very similar approach to what they did - they were both very concentrated, they took it very seriously, they were well-rehearsed and the process was great. Other people come into the studio fresh, unwritten and create a vibe right away."
For Shadow, his working methods are about pulling down the fences. "Music suffers too much from being broken down and put into safe little boxes," he says. "The gap between what's real and authentic and what's sanitised and safe is getting wider. In my own way, I'm trying to break those barriers down. I want my music to have more elements and not less. I don't ever want to play it safe - I want it to expand and grow and constantly expand - I'm not interested in standing still."
Which leads us to Entroducing and a world waiting for a second coming. It has taken time but, if we are to trust Shadow, it may be time worth taking. "After I did Entroducing, I was right into UNKLE and after that right into Spectrum. I want to disappear for a while and then kick in again. I do know what I want to do, I know what direction I want to go in, but I want to do that with my full concentration. I definitely don't feel any pressure, but I feel, if I went right into another Shadow album right now, it might be a little bit premature. "You do get tunnel vision because you're in the studio all the time and you don't get out and you don't get inspired by other things, so you end up making the same stuff - you fall into patterns. I remember Thom Yorke telling me that he didn't want Radiohead to fall into the same habits and ways of working, and it's the same with me."
For now, he continues to DJ up and down America's west coast, listens to loads of DJ-mix albums ("I love hearing DJs doing their thing, anything that's trying to be different, forward-thinking and not trying to look back"), and tries to find new ways of augmenting his 50,000-strong record collection. "Man, it's out of control," he laughs. "I've just put a moratorium on my spending for the rest of the year!"
Maybe what he needs is another job like the one he did for the Austrian government back in 1993. "The Austrian radio service is government-run and they wanted to do a show about American soul and funk. They sent a woman in a truck across America to tape the environment and to tape interviews for an ongoing radio series, but she didn't know how to shop (for records), so they wanted someone to do it for her. That's where I came in. Not only was I paid for it but I had a record budget, too. It was great - I wish it would happen again!"
Quannum's Spectrum album is out now on the Mo Wax label. DJ Shadow plays at HQ (Middle Abbey Street, Dublin 1) on Sunday, August 29th.