'The Outsider' is a record that will confound those who believed they had Shadow pigeonholed. Working with several different vocalists, and in styles spanning everything from hyphy, the Bay Area's newest hip hop hybrid, to folk; from aggressive hardcore rock to left-field alternative dance music, the album is an almost schizophrenic collection from an artist to whom loving music and making music are just two sides of the same coin. Long-term fans need have nothing to fear - his power to conjure and affect an emotion by collaging samples, voices and fragments of long-forgotten recorded dialogue remains undimmed - but the sense here is that, at last, this is the real Shadow, in the raw. It sounds and feels, simply, like the record he's been yearning to make.

"There are songs with rappers, songs with vocalists," he explains. "There are songs that are all live instruments; songs that are all me and keyboards; songs that are all samples. But here's the thing: while I was making it, people would hear a track and like it, then they'd say, 'Why don't you do a whole album like this? This could be your rap album', if it was a rap track, 'then you can go back to doing what you normally do'. But I can't do that, because that's not who I am."

The record was put together from disparate elements over nearly three years. "Artifact (Instrumental)" is a relic of Shadow's work on an abandoned solo LP by former Rage Against The Machine front man Zack De La Rocha. "3 Freaks," which features the hyphy emcees Keak Da Sneak and Turf Talk, was the impetuous, inspired result of Shadow's love-at-first-listen affair with the Bay's answer to crunk. "Seein' Thangs," featuring Mississippi's finest, David Banner, was supposed to include a rap by Mystikal, but he was in prison: so was Shadow's second choice, Pastor Troy. By the time Davis went back to Banner to ask him to add a second verse, Katrina had devastated America's southern shores, a disaster that couldn't help but colour Banner's rap. Kasabian's Sergio Pizzorno and Christopher Karloff were introduced to Shadow by his engineer, and "The Tiger" was the standout result. And even Bay Area icon E-40 is in there, rapping about "the legendary DJ Shadow", suggesting that this Outsider really is anything but.

The key to understanding how all these different voices and inspirations are able to coexist on the same record is to remember that Shadow is as much a fan as a musician. Outside the records he has contributed to as a recording artist, he has built an enviable rep as a mixtape DJ and curator of an idiosyncratic musical archive. The all-45 mixes Brainfreeze and Product Placement, with his friend and fellow producer-DJ Cut Chemist, revolutionised the art of funk DJ-ing and had a massive impact on the obsessive world of funk collecting, while his Schoolhouse Funk compilations have rescued some amazing slices of that most elusive of musical genres - high school marching band funk - from history's trash can (or, at least, America's thrift stores). But in the studio he has often felt constrained by the massive expectations that came after the release of his first album, and the incredibly devoted cult fandom that was attracted to it.