Joshua Davis, better known as DJ Shadow, whose musical career has outlived many a troubled youth, has released his fourth album The Less You Know, The Better. To be fair, it isn't really his fourth because he's made a figurative million other EPs, mixtapes and compilations, but this count doesn't consider Preemptive Strike, Psyence Fiction or Diminishing Returns.

​​

Since his days as a disc jockey on UC Davis campus radio, the Shadow has fathered a genre (trip hop), made a Guiness World Record for first completely sampled album (Endtroducing), won a Goldie award in the San Francisco Bay Area with underground hip hop label (Solesidesnow Quannum Projects), and only been responsible for much of the experimental or instrumental hip hop the last twenty years have witnessed.

​​

His latest offering is no doubt highly progressive and as usual an eclectic notch (or two) above commercial expectation, featuring new motley friends like Tom Vek, more surprisingly Afrikan Boy, Talib Kweli, Posdnuos (De La Soul), Yukimi Nagano (Little Dragon), and almost incongruously a haunting ballad sample from the '50s "I'm Sad and I'm Lonely" retitled "(Not So) Sad and Lonely" that merits mention for the master of mood.

​​

In the realm of visual and performance art, the Shadowsphere has also destroyed several interspatial-dimensional boundaries by incorporating him inside a literal large white ball with mind-blowing visual projections not unlike dream sequence.

 

Here at Zouk, the Shadow sheds some light on... well, the Shadow.