Album: DJ Shadow

The Private Press, A&M

Brian Eno once welcomed the advent of sample culture for the way it allowed "curators to become creators" – even though, at the time, it appeared as if the entire form boiled down to little more than the most basic looping of James Brown and Funkadelic samples for dullards to rap over. Thankfully, things have changed since then, with the likes of Beck and the Avalanches demonstrating how complex, quirky and graceful sample-collages can be, provided the curator has a large enough archive to draw upon and the wit to wield it imaginatively.

Josh Davis, aka DJ Shadow, is the embodiment of Eno's notion, a man with roots in hip-hop culture but tastes that range much farther afield. The sleeve of his Endtroducing... debut – recently voted best dance album of all time in Muzik magazine – featured a shot of the racks of vinyl in a second-hand record shop, an affirmation of his interest in the outré and unusual. The Private Press takes this interest a step further, being a tribute of sorts to the small editions of records pressed up by artists with no access to major-label facilities – the pop equivalent of vanity publishing, perhaps, but justly celebrated here as the lifeblood of musical creation unhindered by industrial imperatives of consumption.

Few of the artists sampled on The Private Press were under any illusion that others would ever hear their work, let alone purchase it; to them, it was enough that it existed, that it was available, should anyone be interested: an approach easily derided as amateurish by those who forget that the word "amateur" derives from the Latin for "lover", and that art made for love has its own value beyond the tawdry confines of money-grubbing professionalism.

In DJ Shadow's case, it also means that his sample-collages are original and fresh, there being scant chance of anyone else sampling, say, Sensations Fix's "Strange about Your Hands", or Barry O'Brian's "Tell Me Why the Tape Wobbles", let alone the record-your-own-voice vinyl postcards that book-end the album with such eerily anonymous familiarity. In the case of Barry O'Brian on "Right Thing/GDMFSOB", the tape-collector's announcement of how he searches through his ever-expanding collection until he finds "just the right thing", serves as both explanation and example of Shadow's methods, the phrase itself being looped and chopped and progressively bolstered with just the right additional elements, building eventually into a densely layered, constantly changing groove.

Of the more chilled moments, "Blood on the Motorway" combines a yoga self-help lecture and a Moby-esque piano figure into an edgy, elegiac anthem lasting eight minutes, while the presence of instruments such as celeste and mandolin on tracks like "Fixed Income" and "You Can't Go Home Again" brings an originality of texture and timbre to a genre that too often settles for the lowest common denominator.