The name John Hillyard might be unfamiliar to many of our readers, even though you’ve likely seen him before. He is the man on the cover of US pressings of DJ Shadow’s single Midnight in a Perfect World (FFRR, 1997), and the source of many samples from Shadow’s seminal LP Endtroducing..... (Mo Wax, 1996). So who was he, and why did his photo appear on the Midnight record? 🎵 This article can be read while listening to a selection of songs John Hillyard worked on, songs made b

"Before the internet [...] knowledge was hard earned and could only be acquired from actual fieldwork. There were no shortcuts."

"I've always loved electro and old school rap. Stuff where if you get a feel for it, it's unmistakable and it's also undeniable..."

"I always had a dream of having my own label, so soon after Mo Wax Japan came to an end, I started Rush! Production..."

"When I first met Gab we went into a booth at KDVS and rapped first thing [...] we were just monks about freestyling..."

"I remember James Lavelle saying "I'm looking for the holy grail for Mo Wax in Japan," and so this was already very intriguing for me..."

"85-86 that's when you start hearing samples in rap records so it went from DJs playing those records to people putting it in the sampler."

This is the first part of a series of interviews with Josh Davis about what influenced and shaped him to become the artist that we know as DJ Shadow. Let's go back to when it all began... Jon You were born on the 29th of June 1972 in San Jose, California to Larry and Penni. Can you tell me where your family came from originally? Josh Most of my early memories were from a town we lived in called Middletown, California, just with my mom because they separated when I was about t

This year marks the 25th anniversary of Endtroducing, DJ Shadow’s debut album. It was composed almost entirely of samples, and many of them were collected in the basement of Records, a record store in Sacramento, California, which has since closed. Records was opened in 1973 by Orin “Ed” Hartman and Lee Cotten. Ed had previously co-owned another store, The Broadway Record Center, which opened in 1960, while Lee had previously sold records through mail-order and advertised his

"I love the cat among the records! It's the notion that everything there has already gone through some kind of human cycle."

"I didn't have a computer so the first [Bomb Hip Hop Magazine] issue is actually done on my mum’s typewriter..."

"I suppose my A&R career started, probably in 1995-96 [...] I was 24 so it was a foot in the door for me as a young London DJ..."

On Friday June 18, 2021 Timothy Jerome Parker aka The Gift of Gab passed away, aged 50. May he rest in peace.

"There was no Oakland rap in 1979 when Sugar Hill Gang came in, it did not exist. I thought it was so cool that people could do that..."

"I was a Street Music Director who was in charge of all the mixshows. We brought in a lot of DJs [...] and Josh was one of them..."

Oras is regarded by Shadow as being his first mentor. The two met in 1986 as Oras was the top DJ at KDVS, the UC Davis college radio.

"I worked at a record label called Poetic Groove [...] either ‘90 or ’91 and I was doing college promotions, sort of learning the industry."