Critic's Pick: DJ Shadow

DJ Shadow, who is also known as Josh Davis, is performing his 1996 debut album Endtroducing..... on his current tour, which marks the 30th anniversary of the release of a great album. Endtroducing takes all the varied music Davis was listening to as a crate digger and sonic innovator and turns it to the purpose of an inward vision. On an album in which samples by Tangerine Dream, Meredith Monk and — in one of the many conceptual coups on the record — Nashville songwriter and singer Dennis Linde coexist along with forgotten ’60s comedian Murray Roman, all music becomes valuable. Endtroducing isn’t dry or academic — Shadow empathizes with his often beleaguered fellow Americans, as he does with Roman, who gets locked up in Long Beach for unpaid parking tickets. The spoken-word fragments work in tandem with music that can be a version of fusion jazz, like “Changeling,” or a kind of futuristic rock, as on “The Number Song.” Like filmmaker Bill Morrison’s 2002 movie Decasia, which employed deteriorating film, Endtroducing uses decomposition as a unifying force, but the album doesn’t make any case for negativity. Shadow achieves a compositional depth throughout the album that rewards concentration, and it’s also kinetic and funny — an uncanny masterpiece.

8 p.m. at Marathon Music Works

1402 Clinton St.