DJ Shadow – Powerstation June 2, 2017

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Humility is not one of the first things you expect when going to see a live performer. Even less so when the performer is a beloved part of their genre with a successful career stretching over two decades. Even less so when their career started with one of Those Albums, one that exploded into such acclaim it became part of popular music legacy. An Illmatic or a Nevermind or of course an Endtroducing. You could really forgive DJ Shadow for feeling he’d earned a bit of his own hype.

Instead we got a confident but unassuming dude in a hoodie, who walked out on stage, took a mic behind his table, and started chatting to the audience about the last time he’d come to Auckland, how many times he’s visited. It doesn’t feel like crowd work, it feels like he’s just saying hello. Then he introduces his own stage show with “Everything you’re about to hear is my own music….this is honestly my favourite part of the day.” The feeling as the lights dim and the screens behind him come to life and the first notes and ambient sounds start to float out of the speakers, is that Shadow feels this is the real start to the show. This is what it’s all about.

And what an introduction. A slowly building atmospheric intro, leading into the first subterranean bass drops that filled us from our shoes to our kidneys, into the spacey, groovy title track of his latest album This Mountain Will Fall. On the screen, imagery reminiscent of the famously trippy sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey, as we saw an astronaut floating over psychedelic landscapes before hurtling through portals of light into space. A kind of peaceful awe was the feeling- we were going to connect to something massively bigger than ourselves, and DJ Shadow was going with us.

I’m one of those people who, when questioned about DJ Shadow, has to shuffle my feet and sheepishly admit I’m only really familiar with Endtroducing. That didn’t really matter last night. The merit of songs old and new was crystal clear, and even the familiar ones were altered with new scratches or breakdowns, and in one case a remix by Hudson Mohawke.

Old or new, everything was filled with complex layers balanced with primal impact. Even at their trippiest, the beats are perfectly constructed to make you shuffle your feet and bob your head. The range of emotions, for mostly lyricless songs, was immense. From initial awe and escstacy to clap-your-hands exuberance, to tranquility and beauty, to old school hip hop swagger, this was music to make you feel something. The wonderfully synched visuals behind Shadow were a superb aid to this- abstract imagery of outer space, jungles and wild animals, industrial cityscapes, neurons and human cells making the stage show feel like a guided acid trip.

Shadow wrapped up his main set to loud cheers and applause, turning the lights on the audience and taking his time moving down the front row shaking hands. Calls for an encore were quickly met, with Shadow re-introducing himself as a musician, saying he feels “blessed” to do what he does. Again the impressive humility, the sense that Shadow feels the live experience is something he shares with us rather than gives to us. That feeling gave fresh relevance to the well-known sample within crowd pleaser Building Steam With a Grain of Salt: “It’s not really me that’s coming…the music’s coming through me”

Cameron Miller

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