A piano from 1969, flipped until he could not repeat the trick
The piano is melancholy and already old, a figure from David Axelrod’s 1969 The Human Abstract, set down in a room that does not belong to 1969. Drums arrive late, soft, hip-hop in the pocket and nowhere near a party. A voice says midnight as if naming a station. Midnight in a Perfect World does not describe a utopia. It describes the hour when the city is finished performing and the samples, stacked, start to feel like weather. Josh Davis, as DJ Shadow, does not rap. He edits. The emotion is in the joins, and in the decision to let a loop stay long enough that you forget it is a loop.
He found the main sample around 1992, early in his life with an MPC, and thought it a lovely little loop at a time when looping was still enough. The beat he flipped in a way he has said he could never do again. He cannot remember the move. Later he laid the loop on that beat, and the song was born. Endtroducing….. came out in 1996 on Mo’ Wax, built from records, no band, the credits in the liner notes because he wanted the lineage visible. James Lavelle asked for the eight samples most likely to cause trouble. The Axelrod piano was on the list, with others Shadow thought might bite. He offered more names. Lavelle said their hands were full. The album was tracked in the Bay Area, in the cramped working method that made a whole record out of other records, and it entered the Guinness book as the first album composed entirely of samples. The boast matters less than the piano.
He wanted the piece as a warm door, one of the three most recognizable things he had made, a song people would know at once and that would not, he hoped, be rinsed. The video he described to a Bay Area paper in 1997 as nothing extraneous: loops of ordinary time, digging for records, the culture that fed the sampler. On a dancefloor the track is too slow to dominate and too complete to talk over. It became the nocturnal center of a record people called trip-hop, a word he has treated as an accident of other people’s filing. The filing stuck. The piano did not need it.
I had the beat, but I’d flipped it in a way such that I could never do it again. I can’t even remember how I did it. At some point I decided to apply that loop to that beat and that’s how Midnight was born.
(DJ Shadow, The Quietus)
What the warmth conceals is the doubt he has said ran under the sessions. A perfect world, in the title, is not a claim. It is a question the music declines to answer, the way other titles on the album ask what your soul looks like and then withhold the diagram. Axelrod, he has said, was a wolf in easy-listening clothes. Shadow kept the clothes and let the wolf pad. You hear both if you stay past the prettiness. Most people stay. That was the friendly note, and it worked.
What remains is the flip he cannot reproduce. Midnight in a Perfect World is a song made of decisions that will not be repeated, which is a strange kind of perfection for a man who works by looping. The hour in the title keeps arriving. The piano, from a record he played to his digging friends, still sounds like it was waiting for this slower night.
