“Building Steam with a Grain of Salt” by DJ Shadow

"Building Steam with a Grain of Salt" comes from Endtroducing....., the debut album DJ Shadow released on Mo' Wax in September 1996, and the credits read like a one-man show: Shadow composed it, produced it, engineered it and mixed it himself, with Dan the Automator pitching in as assistant engineer.

That's the ethic of the whole record. Shadow spent two years on it with little more than an Akai MPC60 MKII sampler, cutting up and stacking pieces of vinyl into an instrumental hip hop album made almost entirely of samples, every track finding its own tempo and mood. British critics were on board from the start, America came around slowly, and the album has since come to be seen as a landmark of instrumental hip hop.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz.