Break it down, baby

Scott Hansen brought a dead machine back to life, and the first thing it played was Midnight in a Perfect World. The machine was a beige Akai MPC60 II, caked in grime, its screen blown, its floppy drive jammed, paint peeling. It had spent roughly twenty years in storage as junk. Hansen, who records ambient electronic music as Tycho, had been asked by DJ Shadow to help with data recovery for the 30th anniversary remaster of Endtroducing....., the 1996 album that the Guinness Book of Records recognises as the first ever composed entirely from samples.

Shadow arrived at Hansen's studio with hundreds of floppy disks and the original MPC that the album was made on. Hansen took one look at the machine, abandoned the data project, and spent weeks soaking parts in dish soap and solvents, replacing the screen, and rebuilding the unit from the chassis up. When Shadow loaded the first disk and hit play, the room heard the opening bars of a record that has sat on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums list for a quarter of a century, coming not from a pressing or a file but from the instrument that made it.

The moment was a window in time, but it was also, if you think about what was really happening, a warning. The album that proved digital sampling could produce work as deep as any live recording turns out to be among the most fragile things in the archive.

Thirteen seconds and a turntable

To understand what came off those disks, you need to understand what went onto them. Endtroducing..... was built between 1994 and 1996 on three pieces of equipment: an Akai MPC60 MKII sampler, a Technics SL-1200 turntable, and an Alesis ADAT eight-track tape recorder. Shadow worked first in his California apartment, then at the Glue Factory, the San Francisco home studio of Dan the Automator, whose contribution was largely leaving the room and letting Shadow get on with using his gear.

The MPC60 II was a Roger Linn design, released in 1991. It sampled at 12-bit and 40kHz, which is lower…