The fruits of my labor!

“Monosylabik”: Construction Through Deconstruction
by The Grizz


What happens when music is no longer played on conventional instruments? What becomes of the medium through which the music is conveyed? What happens when the recordings and technology used to capture instrumentation become the instrumentation? One can find answers to these questions in the advent of the DJ as musician and artist: While disc jockeys once simply changed records and pushed the play button, the modern DJ often employs records, samples, turntables, mixers, and computer programming in the composition of music. Some of what they create sounds wholly original, but it’s often cobbled from bits and pieces of other compositions. With the defining lines of what makes music “music” continually blurring, in the modern music world, we may find ourselves struggling to categorize half of what we hear. The front lines in the battle over this categorization play out in the ever-evolving genre of electronic music.

DJ Shadow (a.k.a. Josh Davis), a prominent figure in the world of instrumental hip-hop for over a decade, remains among the “turntablists”-turned-composers who have helped redefine the electronic music movement. Shadow’s compositional technique, until fairly recently, centered almost entirely on the construction of music through the looping, cutting, and rearranging of samples. Quite plainly, the samples and the turntable themselves serve as his primary instruments. He takes this methodology to the extreme with a track off his sophomore album, 2002’s The Private Press, called “Monosylabik.” The song took two months to complete and consists of one introductory 2-bar, 3-second phrase, looped, sliced, diced, rearranged, and pitch-shifted to create a nearly seven-minute study in deconstruction.

Credited as a key figure in the development of experimental, non-vocal oriented hip-hop, DJ Shadow began honing his mixing and mastering expertise as a high school student in Northern California in the late eighties. Influenced by hip-hop originators like Public Enemy, Eric B & Rakim, and Ultramagnetic MCs, he experimented on a four-track before leaving for college at the decidedly un-urban University of California-Davis. Once out in the free world as a college student, he met other burgeoning hip-hop artists through his college radio station, including Bay-Area rappers Blackalicious and Lyrics Born, and eventually Shadow/Davis created his own label, Solesides, through which he began releasing his original tracks and mixtapes. These tracks included a pressing of a 17-minute “hip-hop symphony” entitled “Entropy,” which spread rapidly throughout the hip-hop underground until it reached the ears of Mo’Wax Records in London. DJ Shadow found himself the recipient of enormous critical acclaim following the release of his first full-length album, Endtroducing…, released by Mo’Wax in 1996. The album comprises a series of sprawling, almost symphonic tracks, many of which are well over seven minutes in length and each pieced together from countless obscure samples and “found sounds,” a technique he continues to exploit with The Private Press. Indeed, Shadow’s audience rarely recognizes any of the samples used in his tracks. A rare decipherable sample from The Private Press, a surging scream by Robert Plant, lasts only a few seconds and mutates from a bass rumble to a treble fizzle. Historically, his tracks are melodically driven, despite featuring prominent beats, and he regularly shifts the pitch of his samples to match the mood and tone he’s searching for. The samples are sometimes so sonically mutated and transformed that even the originator of the sample might be hard pressed to identify his or her own contribution to a DJ Shadow song. Shadow frequently gives his tracks politically or socially charged titles, such as “What Does Your Soul Look Like” and “Midnight in a Perfect World” from Endtroducing…. These songs incorporate vocal samples from obscure movies, classic hip-hop, and even the civil rights movement to convey emotions and messages. In the song “Why Hip Hop Sucks in ’96,” the audience receives the titular answer simply with a singular vocal line as the song ends: “it’s the money!” Shadow may impart subliminal messages and commentary to listeners, but an underlying subtlety defines his music. His messages thrum underneath, awash in the seamless fusion of innumerable rare melodic and rhythmic gems. These snippets that began as inspirations for his music, from funk to rock to hip-hop to ambient to jazz to soul to garage sale record bins, end up becoming his music. DJ Shadow was renowned early in his career for spending entire afternoons in vintage record shops, leaving with shopping carts full of obscure records. From all of this toil, sometimes only a single snare sound might make it onto a single measure of a single track.

With “Monosylabik,” however, the patchwork-quilt concept driving his previous compositions does not quite apply: Instead of many unique patches of sound, one spoken vocal line and three seconds of one musical sample create the quilt.

The track begins with a vocal exclamation: “what you gon’ do now?” and is followed by two bars of down-tempo drums and bass in duple meter, topped off by an electronic sixteenth-note figure. Almost immediately, Shadow begins to toy with the texture: The snare is laced with reverb, and a gear-shifting sound begins to interrupt the established phrasing. An invigoration of the tempo, following the introduction of the track’s basic musical idea, ushers in the beginning of the song’s essential degradation (:56). A faster rhythm in the drums, particularly the snare and cymbals, created by the splintering of the individual sounds of those instruments in the sample, mark a further decomposition (1:05). By a minute and a half in, the bass line pitch-shifts to the tonic, and finally we hear a deviation in the “melody”. The vocals from the beginning of the track abruptly reappear in segmentation (1:45). Steadily but in a purposefully confusing pattern, the beat degrades into a faster rhythm with more frequent interruptions made by slices of the existing rhythm. The listener is slowly, maniacally barraged by an onslaught of mechanical-sounding samples. At 3:35 we hit what sounds potentially like a halfway point in the song. Treble pulsations lurch in a forward motion, sonically appearing and disappearing out of the ether, until the drums and bass break through again with a new theme at 5:25, replacing the original driving beat. At this point, the robotic sounds begin to fold and fall in on themselves, toppling in cascades of noise and giving the impression of an overheating, spluttering machine ready to explode. At this point, the cacophony demands release, and the listener very nearly craves it. But the explosive release the listener desires never arrives, and the piece melts progressively into a puddle of vocals, with the female voice shifting lower and lower, past the tonic and into nothingness.

While an impressive sonic experiment, the track does not necessarily lend itself well to analysis. While just as meticulously designed, Shadow’s composition lacks the formulaic explanation found in other looped and cut compositions like those of Steve Reich. Much of the time, despite knowing that all sounds within are derived from one source, it is hard to guess how a particular new sound originated. This may be a result of DJ Shadow’s live skills: In a concert setting, Shadow is known for cutting, mixing and blending samples on the fly, essentially willing new songs to exist out of the toys in his sandbox. It’s an improvisational style reminiscent of self-referencing jazz, and “Monosyllabik” could very well be informed by improvisation, which would mark a departure from the looped and cut compositions of Reich. Nonetheless, the idea of deconstruction is clearly conveyed. The scope of the piece is massive, and its intricate design makes up the deterioration of the original musical idea itself. It’s a concept that is as confusing as it is brilliant – a proof-of-concept that shows electronic samples bred in the hip-hop world being employed in similar fashion to modern composers like Reich. Every new sound introduced during the course of the track ushers in a development in the degradation of the primary sample. We can hear sections develop as new musical ideas unfold with more disjunct patterns and rhythms. It is the rhythm, ultimately, that drives and links the piece into a whole, serving as glue when the song threatens to fold in on itself in a wash of noise. The few places where the beat drops out feel like black holes sucking the sound inward. When the rhythm does finally die, the track begins to die, and the vocal line fizzles out lethargically and deliberately to the end.

Pointing out DJ Shadow’s achievement with “Monosyllabik” can be a challenge: Mash-ups are all the rage now, and it isn’t uncommon to find a blend of say, Jay-Z’s “The Black Album” with The Beatle’s “The White Album.” But Shadow beat everyone to the punch by pioneering this sound from way back in 1996, and his mastery of the cut and looped composition elevates him beyond the realm of pop music and stands him next to modern composers like Steve Reich. He progressed from a DJ who created vast compositions from bottomless collections of samples to creating a credible, fascinating and listenable sonic experiment from one vocal line and three seconds of music. If it were a literary achievement, one might liken DJ Shadow’s progression to going from composing a masterpiece out of pages from every book in the library, to composing a masterpiece from one line in a single book. It’s a vast, compelling leap that goes some distance to connect the wide space between modern composition and modern pop music.

Thanks to T.