By Eliot Wilder / During his most serious bouts of nausea, Sartre's Roquentin turned to a jazz song in order to come to grips with a reality that, by its very nature, sickened him. He turned to music because it offered substance and structure, because it was fixed outside naked existence: "The record exists, the air struck by the voice that vibrates, exits, the voice that made an impression on the record existed. I who listen, I exist."

In these post-modern, post-September-11 times, where, other than art, can you turn for sense? Where can you seek refuge? Of what can you say, "I know that!"? It's easy to become lost in a sort of amnesic nostalgia, closing yourself off from the world in a curtains-drawn room of fantasy and memory, but that would amount to nothing more than what Sartre himself would call bad faith. Or you can take spicks and specks of a life lived and reconfigure them into something sui generis, something that, like one of Proust's madeleines, opens gateways to sensations that not only provide comfort but also insight into the human condition.

For the last several months I've been finding myself drawn again and again to DJ Shadow's "The Private Press," a sample-based record of such humanity, brilliance and scope that it defies categories as it creates new ones. "Press" actually betters Shadow's 1996 album "Entroducing," itself a recording of unparalleled strangeness and depth. Whereas the earlier work presented us with a radical collage of surreal sounds and delicious breakbeats, "Press" is more mature and epic - and more dark.

Shadow (a.k.a. Josh Davis) is an avid collector of both the old and odd recordings, and his talents lies in discovering new ways in which to best mix and match these mostly forgotten sounds, adding a certain resonance, so to speak. What he ends up with is music that not just makes old new again, it opens wide a fresh yet curiously familiar dimension, like finding rooms in your house that you never knew were there.

A 1950s "recordio-gram" recording of Nubella Johnson, who is attempting to convey to her brother Lester how much he is missed, bookends "Press." "There's so many things I could say," Nubella says, her voice choked with emotion, "but I just can't get them together." Shadow employs this touching snippet of lost memory to frame his concerto of remembrances of things past as a way to address the forward-thinking eternal questions: Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going?

Throughout "The Private Press," there is also melody, joy and anguish. The driving "Giving Up the Ghost" starts simply, with flecks of notes forming a foundation onto which Shadow slowly layers mammoth beats, building an air of palpable dread. With its intimations of life and mortality, the mournful "Six Days" is what might be considered a proper song, but its harrowing atmosphere is not all that different from the disturbing and abstract "Mongrel Meets His Maker." "Mashin' on the Motorway" spotlights Quannum's Lateef hitting the gas for a high-rev blast of rapping road rage that would send Eminem smashing into the median. Both "Blood on the Motorway" and "You Can't Go Home Again," which nicks a distressed-sounding bit from Paul Simon's "El Condor Pasa" - itself a song that used a sample of sorts - are majestic and ethereal.

Shadow himself has said he intended "The Private Press" to be a nonlinear work, and in many ways it is disparate, cracked and confounding. But listen to it as a whole, and you can't deny there's a singular sensibility at work, one that does indeed make sense, one in which you can seek refuge, one of which you can say, "I know that!" A sweeping symphony for the new millennium or a fractured portrait of our fractious times? Yes.

From Amplifier magazine