20 minutes into his set at a Miami club last December, DJ Shadow was asked to stop spinning because his music was “too future” for the crowd and was replaced with a DJ who mixed more popular music. The Trip-Hop king left the stage and tweeted, “I don’t care if I get kicked out of every rich club on the planet. I will never sacrifice my integrity as a DJ … never.”

Since dropping his mesmerizing debut album “Endtroducing …” in 1996, DJ Shadow has been at the forefront of mixing and spinning records. He is regarded as a mash up innovator and his instrumental records have influenced everyone from Radiohead to composer David Axelrod. DJ Shadow is one of the most pure DJs around and his manual way of spinning is both revered and idolized.

Born Josh Davis, DJ Shadow grew up in the cow town of Davis, California where he would sometimes make music with members of Blackalicious and Lyrics Born. He began to release mix tapes through his own label, Soulside, and his recordings started attracting buzz through the digital underground in the early 1990s. “Endtroducing …” was released in the fall of 1996 and it was an immediate benchmark in the DJ atmosphere. His entrancing use of digitally altered drums and smooth samplings of forgotten songs were innovative and fresh. DJ Shadow took listeners through another dimension into a musical fantasia.

The record is almost completely sample-based and each snippet of a song, dialogue or noise creates a colorful mosaic of music. After awing the music community with “Endtroducing…,” DJ Shadow continued to uphold his place as a commander for record mixing. His most recent record, The Less You Know, the Better, released in 2011, had DJ Shadow adding new elements such as loud guitars and record scratching into his stellar mix. His collaboration with Little Dragon, “Scale it Back,” is a piano ballad showered in waves of reverb and electronic programming.

One of the qualities that makes DJ Shadow stand out from other mixing artists are the records he finds, or digs up, to use in his recordings. He’s known for spending full days in the basements of record stores scanning heaps of record stacks looking for that one gem to use in one of his mixes. Cut Chemist, of Jurassic 5 and Ozomatli, refers to DJ Shadow as “the king of digging” in the 2001 documentary Scratch. In 1985, hip-hop producers Steinski and Double Dee released the mash up track “Lesson 3 (History of Hip-Hop).”

Drawing from all over the sound spectrum with Led Zeppelin classic rock, old funk from the Incredible Bongo Band and a John F. Kennedy speech, “Lesson 3” became a milestone in hip-hop production and served as an inspiration for generations to come. DJ Shadow picked up where they left off and furthered the sonic sphere of mixing records. Dedicated to the art and determined to continue exploring the combinations of sounds, DJ Shadow’s Saturday set at Kaleidoscope will be a musical mecca for fans of instrumental hip-hop.

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