I've been in a 90s hip hop rut for the past couple years and I'm pulling myself out of it by making playlists of the original songs getting sampled (one great thing about good hip hop is that any given song or pair of songs tends to produce a pretty excellent playlist), and one thing I've discovered is that RJD2, a musician I was into in the mid-aughts during an instrumental hip hop phase, puts essentially zero effort into things; the best example I can think of there is "Bless The Telephone", which he "covered" from Labi Siffre in the funniest possible way.

Finding stuff like that will definitely give you a new appreciation for DJ Shadow (both, for what it's worth, were excellent live).

Also Labi Siffre: very good stuff.

Fun.

In case you didn't know: KEXP occasionally does breakdowns. Here they played every song sampled on Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique. https://www.kexp.org/breakdown/paulsboutique/

Not my favorite band (they're fine), but I'll say that from Paul's Boutique through Hello Nasty, they're by far the best to generate playlists from.

Let's not dismiss RJD2's studio efforts entirely, he made Ghostwriter: https://parallaxatives.blogspot.com/2011/06/sample-spotting-...

and the whole of that first album, Deadringer, is great.

Deadringer's how I got into him. And I still like a lot of it! And I saw him at Abbey Pub and it was a fantastic show. But also: his cover of "Bless The Telephone" is just him playing a recording of "Bless The Telephone". :)

Glad you've been able to catch him live!

Oh, I only found this which is an actual cover - did he put the original on one of his releases too?

https://www.whosampled.com/cover/5048/RJD2-Making-Days-Longe...

Ghostwriter has always been one of my favorite songs.

DJ Shadow's Entroducing [0] is an amazing body of work if you think about the effort required to crate dig for all the samples. Truly mind boggling!

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endtroducing.....

Entroducing is one of the albums that got me into music production as a hobby. But to put some shine on some other great samplers while we're at it, The Avalanches' Since I Left You is also fantastic is comprised of around 3500 samples.

On top of the effort, the infinite patience, it's also one of the most amazingly musical things ever put together with electronics (one box!) Shadow stands in a class of one.

Have you ever heard the album, "Since I Left You" by The Avalanches?

The whole album is nothing but a medley, and it's one of my favorite albums of all time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBjuX1Gs5hU

Yes, really great album! I’ve not listened to it for years so thanks for the reminder

I'm a huge FSOL fan and I think what they did with sampling to produce albums like ISDN was ground breaking stuff.

Daft Punk not so much. Rather than composing the samples together they use the entire sample as the hook. Maaaybe they might speed it up a bit but that's usually it.

I definitely agree, but can’t argue with the end results that Daft Punk come up with (they’re not really my kind of genre but I don’t think you can argue they make great songs) and there aren’t that many artists out there making such catchy and successful sample based songs, so they definitely still have some skills which are quite unique (but maybe it’s more like deep music knowledge and recognising catchy hooks, than surgically splicing samples together)

For a journey into amazing music assembled from samples, have a listen to Amon Tobin.

I didn’t realise his stuff was all sample based. I’ve heard some of it and saw him live once, it’s a bit “frenetic” for me (I’m drawn to smoother more hypnotic stuff in general) but definitely cool!

I guess it depends which era/album you happen to catch; Long Stories (2019) is pretty chilled out, and the Chaos Theory soundtrack is somewhere in the middle.