In 1998 I had a crush on a girl named Ellie. On a rainy day we decided on an awkward quasi-date to Rasputin's Records and Blondie's Pizza. I sat down in the passenger seat of her beat-up Accord, she started the engine, and her tape player introduced me to a twinkling piano and hypnotizingly slow breakbeats. The notes fell like raindrops on her windshield, and forever in my mind, that moment, Ellie's perfume, my nervous tension, and DJ Shadow's "Building Steam With A Grain of Salt" were locked inseparably together. Whenever the rain starts to fall -- not a hard rain and not a sprinkle, but a steady, plodding, relentless patter of water on earth -- I think of this song.

Josh Davis, also known as DJ Shadow, makes that kind of impact with the arcane record samples he artfully merges into cohesive, thoughtful, revelatory aural collages. He is obsessed. He digs up sounds you and I have never heard before, and maybe a thing or two we have heard before, and fuses them into some brilliant new heterogeneous dream with the power to stir the subconscious and induce sheer awe.

Once I bought his CD and broke free of the hold that "Building..." had on me, I got accustomed to the other twelve tracks of the album. There were many pleasant surprises. I found "Midnight in a Perfect World" just as addicting as the song that got me hooked in the first place, a loping, seductive, scratch-heavy, impossibly beautiful five minutes and two seconds. "Changeling" was another fast favorite, like a lush sunset after a long summer day. "Stem/Long Stem" creeped me out with pernicious string samples surrounding a single lonely chime. And although it took some time, "Mutual Slump" eventually won me over with its dual personality: crashing percussion and ugly guitar riffs on the one hand, and a mournful, echoing backdrop offset by a shy girl's spoken diary on the other.

Many have already mentioned what an impact this album had on a number of prominent artists such as Moby and Radiohead. DJ shadow's influence has reverberated for several years now in the music industry. But for me, I can only attest to what it did for me when seated next to an unreachable girl, in the midst of my quixotic quest, on a gray and rainwashed early spring afternoon.

It was nothing short of an epiphany.

"Entroducing..." is perhaps one of the most amazing albums in the world of music. While an album that is built entirely off of samples may have some think of Puff Daddy's theft of '80's songs, Shadow is far from the sampling of Puff Daddy. Shadow loops interesting samples from forgotten and obscure songs. He layers samples from different records and uses odd effects to create strange soundscapes. If you give this album a listen, you will be hooked. Check out "The Numbers Song" (a Metallica guitar loop mixed with soul and hip-hop records? Where else have you heard that?), "Napalm Brain/Scatter Brain", and "Midnight In A Perfect World". For more Shadow, check out Preemptive Strike which features his first masterpiece "In/Flux" and the entire "What Does Your Soul Look Like" EP. Pick this up and prepare to be amazed.

This is very well one of the greatest albums ever made. And the reason is because it is music. It's like a jazz album. And for me it's the best jazz album I have ever heard since Kind Of Blue (Miles Davis).

It's not techno, infact it's the farthest thing from it. For me it's a mix between jazz and hip hop. Dj Shadow grew up as a hip hop kid, collected records since he was younger than 13 or something, and made this album.

The extraordinary thing about it is that it is 100 percent samples. Not many people will believe it when they first hear it, because it's crafted together to sound like it isn't samples. For example, how many people have heard a hip hop track with a deep piano sample (that also isn't "funky" whatsoever) throughout the whole song? Or emotional female vocals to fill in empty spots (that's also a sample)? Or better yet, how many have ever heard, in their whole lives, a song that has a classical bass loop, mixed with a female vocals, mixed with a funky wah wah guitar, and a heavy slowed down hip hop beat? When I first heard it I thought to myself "oh he must be playing that piano" or "oh he's probably got a keyboard that can do that" or "his girl is probably doing the vocals there". But it isn't like that at all, his keyboard, piano, and girl who can sing is his records!

This album is different, and that is the great thing about it.

Now another fun thing to figure out is where the hell did he get all those damn samples? There's some samples on this album that NO ONE knows about! And that's another extraordinary thing, it truly shows how much he worked on this album.

I saw a review back here that said his beats weren't raw and rugged, well this is as raw as it gets. And a few said that it was very hard to dance to, well if you want something like that then go buy an album by a guy who has a drum machine that goes up to 400 bpm and a keyboard that has a few keys on it. Another one said that this isn't the best drum and bass record they've ever heard, well read the above comment. And finally, I read one review that said his DJ skills are like those of a dj who plays at a bar, well he has many many records, and if he's been around his tables for that long, he probably knows a lot more than a bar dj about djing.

This album absolutely floored me the first time I heard it. I happened upon it at a local record store in one of the listening booths and decided to give it a listen. I had never heard of DJ Shadow up to that point but my whole world changed the moment I put on those headphones and pressed play. It begins with an introduction that sounds like your ordinary dialogue sampled intros found in many hip hop records, but right after the sampled voice says, "producing..." in floods a piano that sounds more classical than jazzy or funky, the drums kick in and the journey begins. There's an atmosphere to this album (all the great ones do). You can just feel it. Sometimes the air is thick and foggy, sometimes your head feels cluttered, and sometimes you just sit back, relax, and take it all in. This album has been in my collection for a long time and it still to this day amazes me and is constantly in my cd player. I've heard people say this is a hip hop record, or trip hop, blah, blah, blah. Catergorization of music gets pretty tiresome, but if I were to categorize this album I'd put it under "great music", because that's what it is. It's simply great music.

So much has been said about this album and about DJ Shadow. Let me try to play Shadow and sample some of the reviews for you. You'll see certain comparisons pop up again and again: The Dust Brothers produced Beastie Boys' album Paul's Boutique, Tricky's Maxinquaye, Aphex Twin. The quality of the comparisons should indicate to you that this is a special album. It has the same versatility with samples that Paul's Boutique does, though they are generally less recognizable than those on Paul's Boutique. It's got the dark and insistent and trippy qualities of Maxiquaye. And it has the deep weirdness of Aphex Twin's work, particularly, for my money, Selected Ambient Works Volume 1. Of course, it is also different than each of those albums--lacking vocals for the most part and much more musically lush and dense than the sparse and etheral Selected Ambient Works Volume 1. The drums, Shadow's trademark, are greatly dominant here.

This album stands as one of the best of the 1990s, among such electronica classics as the aforementioned Maxinquaye, Massive Attack's Blue Lines, and Leftfield's Leftism. As a reviewer of the deluxe edition put it: "it is truly the first musically post-modern piece of music in the recording art industry." Some people will be too sophisticated for this album or on the other end incapable of appreciating it. If you're reading this with a mind towards purchasing this album, you're not one of them. It will blow your mind, I assure you.

As late great British DJ John Peel said in his intro to the Diminishing Returns import, "you may find this hard to believe but you stand poised on the brink of hearing the mix of the year, fronted by command much given to frank and furious and usually accurate condemnation of the awful beings that inhabit the world of popular music--DJ Shadow--the celebrated San Franciscan weirdo." You stand poised on the brink of hearing a great album.