DJ Shadow

MCD proudly presents

DJ Shadow 
Plus guests

The Academy 
Sunday 7th July 2024
Over 18s Show 
Doors 7pm 

Tickets on sale Friday 19th April at 10am

 For over 30 years, Josh Davis has expressed his passion, taste, and values through the music he creates as DJ Shadow. Following on from his most recent sold-out gig in the Academy Dublin, DJ Shadow has just announced his headline gig in The Academy, Dublin on Sunday 7th July 2024.

Tickets from €33.65 including booking fee.

The name alone evokes a high watermark for instrumental hip-hop and composition, from his first masterpiece, Endtroducing..., to the genre-hopping UNKLE release Psyence Fiction, to the otherworldly elegance of The Private Press. His work in the ‘90s and first decade of the 2000s is as essential as it is hard to pin down.

It’s a practice Shadow learned as a young boy, enamoured with collecting comic books, baseball cards, 12-inch records, and precious songs captured to cassette from the radio airwaves late at night in northern California. With great seriousness and love, he will describe the second-hand transistor AM radio on which he first heard Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message” when he was ten years old. Or his mind-expanding encounter with Public Enemy’s “Rebel Without a Pause” and that single’s howling saxophone blast. At the heart of DJ Shadow’s musical project is deep listening. “I’m always trying to please or impress the most advanced listener,” he says. “The type of aficionado who will respect the layers upon layers of synth that went into making a sound that can’t be readily identified but will make you want to share the track with a friend and say, This part right here.”

The first sampled words heard on DJ Shadow’s forthcoming album Action Adventure, his seventh solo LP, are “all my records and tapes.” In fact, they are some of the only words heard on what is almost an entirely instrumental release; they’re a kind of thesis statement for an album that has its roots in the drifting, destabilising days of the COVID lockdown. Action Adventure is an inward-looking project, made by Shadow alone without any collaborators. Action Adventure tells the listener: “This is about my relationship to music. My life as a collector and curator. All my records and tapes, and no one else’s.” The result is the most exciting DJ Shadow LP in years.

Shadow began work on Action Adventure on January 1, 2022, and the early tracks pushed him further into his compositional bag. “I didn't want to write music that was formatted for vocalists. I wanted to write music that flexed different energies,” he says. Though he isn’t classically trained, he asked himself questions like “Which chord progression would be most natural here, and which would be least predictable?” and worked according to the inner logic that felt right to him. His rule for the record was simple: no compromises. “I’m entering my fourth decade doing this—what do I want to represent? I know that I don’t want to only make beats for some potential vocalist that I’ve never met, and who may not share my vision. I want this record to stand or fall on my own credentials.”

The title Action Adventure evokes the halcyon days of video store browsing, and it’s fitting that he provides a crowd-pleasing ending. Of course, this is still a DJ Shadow album, so don’t mistake that for anything corny. This is a record of mature sparseness, a revitalising and focused release that suggests a refined late period from a grandmaster of our time. “Rightly or wrongly, I’m not thinking about anybody’s musical wants or desires but my own,” he says.

Action Adventure The Tour Take 2 Dates

04.07.24- Limelight 1, Belfast
05.07.24- Cyprus Avenue, Cork
07.07.24- The Academy, Dublin

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