All of these pieces that make up the genetics of Endtroducing are distilled most potently on its first full song, ‘Building Steam with a Grain of Salt’. Stemming from a dusty piano loop, a forceful chord stab infiltrates to add menace and drama, further backed by choral vocals that could have ripped from a movie soundtrack. It’s actually extracted from Jeremy Storch’s ‘I Feel A New Shadow’, an unturned stone of progressive pop from the early 70s that contributes to the baroque feel of Shadow’s flip. Digging deeper reveals his ability to do what great producers from this time period did to create successful beat music - setting a tone, and then toying with the elements. Transpired from the big beat scene that features the likes of Fatboy Slim and the Chemical Brothers, the technique allows for ideas to be extended far longer than the length of a radio edit, while simultaneously letting each element have their time in the spotlight to be absorbed. Take the slow funk guitar that seeps in at the halfway point as if Shadow is finding and sponging up new samples on the fly, or the clanging drums that maintain a straightforward, non-intrusive groove until being offset and contorted to impressively string a full drum solo. The underlying accomplishment in all this is how he sources such far-reaching samples, alters them with reckless abandon, and joins them into a rugged yet harmonious mosaic, and this perseveres throughout Endtroducing. Clearly, Shadow has enough to sustain a single track this long without overfilling the pot, and he even utilises the cohesiveness of his work to bring together a well-groomed concept.

Marching like a lost cut from a fantasy blockbuster soundtrack, ‘Stem / Long Stem’ possesses a harp from ‘Love Suite’ by Nirvana (no, the UK prog band) that has that mediaeval, GoT-like drama. Playing off an opposing guitar part, they sound as though they’re about to face off on the sonic battlefield created by the creeping, intermittent stomp of a drum. Vocal samples from The Mystic Number National Bank and KRS-One pops off the swelled Japanese strings taken from an old folk-rock record by country legend Dennis Linde, but the weightlessness of this moment is disturbed by lightspeed, Run-DMC-snatched drums that signal a high-drama climax. Everything screeches to a halt, leaving nothing but silence to fill the void as Shadow transitions into the second part of the double-billed track. A lone keyboard fades in to survey the scene, slowing reviving every element piece by piece into something new yet mournful, like a funeral dirge.

As much as the then-24-year-old finds new ways to use plunderphonics for advantage, it is unequivocal that Endtroducing is an album that primarily celebrates the practice of crate digging. To paraphrase an interview with DJ Shadow from this time, he subverts and decontextualises the samples he picks, and spits them back out into something more relevant to what’s around him. However, this isn’t why his first feature-length is hailed as a masterpiece - it’s because while the physical limitations of exclusively using samples hold many others back, for Shadow, it seems to have the opposite effect.