Many records get played over a Guinness. Not many hold one.

The basement

Josh Davis grew up in Davis, California, twenty minutes from Sacramento. He was a DJ at KDVS, the university's student radio station, from his teens. It was in the KDVS lounge, as a freshman in 1990, that he met two other hip-hop obsessives. Remember them. They come back later.

He also spent everything he had on vinyl, and most of it went to one shop: Rare Records, on K Street in downtown Sacramento, a store whose sign carried a logo drawn by the cartoonist Robert Crumb. Davis dug there for years. Eventually the owner did the thing every collector dreams about: he gave him the keys to the basement.

It was not a tidy room. It was a cavern of unsorted, unwanted vinyl, stacked floor to ceiling, most of it written off as unsellable. In Doug Pray's 2001 DJ documentary Scratch, Davis sits down in the middle of it and explains that most of Endtroducing was built from records pulled out of that room. He talks about it the way people talk about fate, with records surfacing at the moment he needed them.

No band, no budget, no instruments

The setup was almost nothing: an Akai MPC60 sampler, a Technics SL-1200 turntable, and an Alesis ADAT tape machine.

No band. No session players. Nobody playing a note. He started in his own apartment in 1994 and later worked out of the Glue Factory, the San Francisco home studio belonging to his friend Dan the Automator. The raw material never changed. Every drum, every string, every voice was lifted off someone else's vinyl and rebuilt: dozens of source albums, hundreds of individual fragments, pulled from jazz, funk, rock, film soundtracks, spoken word, anything.

It took two years. Endtroducing..... came out on Mo' Wax on 16 September 1996 in the UK, and that November in the States.

The world record

In 2001, Guinness certified it: the first album made completely from samples.

It's worth being precise about what that means, because crate diggers argue about it and they're not wrong to. Sampling was decades old by 1996. Hip-hop had been built on it, and Paul's Boutique rivals Endtroducing for sheer number of sources. What no one had done before was make an entire album with no original recording of any kind on it. Careful writers still say "almost entirely." Guinness said entirely, and the record stands.

The cover is the story

Look at the sleeve. Two men digging through the racks under flat fluorescent light. One is holding a stack of records, in focus. The other is turning toward the camera, his face smeared with motion blur.

They aren't models and it isn't a set. It's Rare Records, the actual shop, shot by the photographer Brian Cross, better known as B+. The man in focus is Chief Xcel of Blackalicious. The blurred one is the rapper Lyrics Born, wearing a wig.

Those are the two men from the KDVS lounge. The freshmen he met in 1990, who went on to found the SoleSides label with him. The record is made from the basement, and the cover is a photograph of his friends standing in it. In the fuller version printed inside, ABB Records founder Beni B is browsing another aisle. Open the gatefold and the shop's cat is in there too.

The muted, slightly sickly colour wasn't a filter. It was the shop's own lighting. In 1996, when hip-hop covers meant high-gloss lighting and expensive styling, B+ shot three friends doing the ordinary thing they actually did.

The record is made of other people's records. The cover is a photo of the room they came from. Nothing about it is decoration.

What to listen for

"Best Foot Forward" is a forty-nine-second throat-clear. Then "Building Steam With a Grain of Salt" arrives, and it's still the clearest window into the method: a women's choir, a drummer talking, a guitar figure, all from different decades, all sounding like one band that never existed.

"Midnight in a Perfect World" is the one people carry with them, and the one B+ shot the video for. "Organ Donor" is the party trick. "Stem/Long Stem" is where it goes properly dark. "The Number Song" runs on a bass drone lifted from Metallica's "Orion", the Cliff Burton instrumental off Master of Puppets. Nobody hears it coming.

It runs sixty-three minutes. It's built to be listened to front to back, which is the whole argument for owning it on vinyl rather than letting it shuffle.

Thirty years on

Endtroducing made Time's All-Time 100 Albums list in 2006. Rolling Stone put it at 329 on its 500 greatest albums list in 2020. You can hear its fingerprints on J Dilla, on The Avalanches, on Flying Lotus, on most instrumental hip-hop made since.

The K Street shop is long gone from that corner. The basement was emptied. What's left is an hour of music assembled from records nobody wanted, made by someone who was paying attention.

The credits inside say it better than we can: this album reflects a lifetime of vinyl culture.

Now back on the shelf.