Busdriver Interview and Profile: “The Avatar of ‘Less Yeses, More No’s’ in the Era of ‘Yes, We Can”

A recent interview and profile of rapper Busdriver, written for TheFanzine.com.

“That’s the problem with underground hip-hop is that we don’t have street cred with niggas in the hood,” Busdriver expounded from the stage of Los Angeles’ El Rey Theatre while muscularly wearing a mauve polo shirt. “College kids just download the shit, so it’s a small demographic we’re chasing after.” Opening for UK grime rapper Dizzee Rascal and Definitive Jux label head El-P at the end of a month long tour, Busdriver tore through his song lyrics at nearly double the already astonishing speed of his albums, pulsating around the stage, feigning anger and ecstasy, a mist of perspiration rising up into the stage lights while he freestyled about walking down Wilshire Blvd. in cowboy spurs. At one point he grabbed a life-sized cut-out of an eighties gold chain-wearing rapper and thrust the microphone into its face and––perhaps in an effort to catch his breath––demanded, “Now sing your part.”

Read the complete article here.

Doseone interview: “I may not be much else in this world but I guarantee you I am getting to rapper heaven.”

Published in The Believer, Oct. 2007.

Adam Drucker, better known by the alias Doseone, has said his initial attraction to rap was as much about the “persona/ego projection” as a love of words. Drucker cut his teeth on the rap-battle circuit, exchanging rhymes with Eminem and other MCs, until his friendships with like-minded musicians led to the creation of the Anticon collective/record label, which fuses hip-hop to indie rock, ambient music, poetry, and experimental noise.

Although Drucker has recorded several solo albums, his primary efforts have been collaborative. With the trio cLOUDDEAD, he worked with Yoni Wolf (Why?) and producer David Madson (Odd Nosdam) to create a pair of critically acclaimed albums that pasted non-sequitur raps onto sleepwalking funk beats and archaic keyboards. His most consistent collaboration has been with producer Jel (Jeffrey Logan) as Themselves. The duo has joined forces with German indie-rockers the Notwist as 13 & God and with other musicians in their current project, Subtle.

Read the complete article in The Believer.

Supergroup in Reverse: The Afterlife of cLOUDDEAD

Published in The Fanzine, Nov. 2007.

Every once in a great while when a band breaks up, it’s like a supergroup in reverse; each performer’s independent project is packed with an exactness of vision that seemed impossible in collaboration: as if Bob Dylan had always just been the guy who played rhythm guitar in the Traveling Willburys and then – Bam! – came out with Blonde on Blonde; a complete inversion of the rock archetype of Paul McCartney’s post-Beatle blandness.

Eccentric hip-hop trio, cLOUDDEAD, part of the Anticon collective, formed in Cincinnati in 1999 and relocated to Oakland together in 2001. Producer Odd Nosdam (David Madson) built murky soundscapes from archaic keyboards, flea market reel-to-reel tapes and a Roland SP-202 “Dr. Sample” while rappers Doseone (Adam Drucker) and Why? (Yoni Wolf) overlapped non-sequitur lyrics about paint-spattered eye-glasses, their neighborhoods and the universality of death. As self-described shut-ins who shared apartments in various permutations, on their albums they sound telepathically close: Why? and Doseone completing each others’ sentences while the production mirrors their hypnotic, sometimes morbid humor.

Read the complete article at The Fanzine.

Odd Nosdam “Burner”; Why? “Sanddollars”

Odd Nosdam Burner
Why? Sanddollars

This Odd Nosdam album is weirdly Enya-esque and at the same time totally fucking good — full of sleepy hip-hop beats and hypnotic analog keyboards, although there’s a bit much ambient field recordings between the “songs” for my taste. Why’s Sanddollars EP is too unusual and intricate to brush off as a novelty record. Nasal vocals, concert hall grand pianos and guitar rock songs about the joys of staying up all night tagging. Both albums utilize dreamy production that seem to typify the multi-faceted, multi-tiered umbrella of Anticon projects.

Originally published in XLR8R, August 2005

Mike Ladd “Negrophilia”, Daedelus “Exquisite Corpse”

Originally published in XLR8R Spring 2005

Mike Ladd
NEGROPHILIA
Thirsty Ear

Instead of cramming jazz into hip-hop‘s beats, Ladd lets hip-hop spill out in a manner that would make Ornette Coleman and other pursuers of freedom proud. Name dropping Duchamp and Malinowski, he isn‘t trying to be clever, just not interested in dumbing it down. A bevy of instrumental tracks allow the talented live band to work their chops. On “Back at Ya,” a duck-walking oboe riff is backed by what sounds like Tony Allen in a garage punk band: ominous, sad, sarcastic, and smart. Most of these tracks aren‘t exactly crowd pleasers, instead Ladd has carved out an unusual and consistent album.

Daedelus
EXQUISITE CORPSE
Mush Records

MF Doom speaks the truth when he says, “This beat is strictly retarded, yo/sound like it came off the late Ricky Ricardo show.” Daedelus gets a lot of mileage from the contrast between his fly beats and string-soaked samples from old TV soundtracks and public domain 78s. Mike Ladd guests, describing the forlorn smell of Taco Bell as experienced by an expat returning to the US, and Jogger‘s remix has pants-wettingly good synths. Exquisite Corpse is a concept album about death: it isn‘t a showtune about getting gunned down in Vegas, gangsta-style, but more like a lullaby for dying in your sleep.

More reviews for XLR8R.

Konono No. 1: Congolese electrified lamellophones

Originally published through Planet magazine, Summer 2005.

Congolese trance group Konono Nº1 plays raucous near-punk renditions of traditional music on makeshift electrified likembés. Instead of the traditional resonating gourd, the likembés’ plucked metal strips are attached to pickups crafted from the magnets of car alternators and amplified through megaphones left behind by the Dutch colonists, giving the instrument a sound somewhere between a xylophone and the dirtiest, most distorted guitar. The group’s percussion is equally homemade: pots, pans and hi-hats made from hubcaps. Founded 25 years ago in Kinshasa, Konono is based on Bazombo trance music. It is part of what the Congolese call “tradi-moderne”, traditional music jerry-rigged for a booming urban sound. Championed by Tortoise and Dutch art rockers the Ex, the group has found an audience outside the confines of “world music” in electronic and experimental rock circles. After becoming a fan 20 years ago, Vincent Kenis (producer of Zap Mama) tracked them down for a debut recording session. With no reliable recording studios in Kinshasa, the album was recorded outdoors onto a G4 laptop, apropos its DIY aesthetic. Raw and unusual, Konono Nº1 is not to be missed.

Negativland on Fair Use and Downloading

This article originally appeared in XLR8R, Summer 2005
Negativland has always had a penchant for the kind of toilet humor that would make Duchamp proud. Their latest album No Business comes complete with a bright yellow whoopee cushion emblazoned with the copyright symbol. As the Supreme Court hears the case of music industry behemoth Sony against file-sharing programs like Grokster, it looks like 25 years into their career Negativland was 25 years ahead of the curve and the murky ethics of found sound appropriation which Negativland has explored through electronic music and social satire couldn’t be more current. No Business contains collaged samples of Ethel Mermen, Disneyland rides and a melodramatic Grammy awards speech by the president of the RIAA on the evils of downloading music.

Mono Pause/Neung Phak Interview

Published in The Fanzine, Aug. 2005.

Each night of Mono Pause’s cross-country tour in 2002, masked men came onstage, threatening to kill them if they continued to play while a voice with a heavy Eastern European accent announced over the sound system, “Tonight’s concert by Mono Pause has been canceled. Please find the exit and leave.” In most cities some audience members, skeptical of the staged event, lingered to see the show. However, according to band members, of all the venues they toured, Los Angeles was the only city where the crowd immediately cleared out.

Based out of Oakland but with strong roots in River Falls, Wisconsin, multi-faceted experimental rock group Mono Pause operates under many names but are perhaps best known under the guise of Neung Phak – a loose Thai translation of “Mono Pause” (also conveniently the name of a Lao dish of chicken, coconut and banana leaves). The band plays interpretations of catchy Southeast Asian pop, disco and traditional music and also writes their own songs in a similar style. Band members Mark Gergis and his brother Erik have traveled extensively throughout the region and were inspired by nightclub bands there and the tapes they made of shortwave broadcasts, sometimes basing a song around a 30-second snippet interrupted by static from one of these tapes without any knowledge of the identity of the original performer.

Read the complete article at The Fanzine.

Solex “The Laughing Stock of Indie Rock”

Originally published in Bitch magazine, Spring 2005

Solex is the alter ego of Dutch record store owner, Elizabeth Esselink, who pieces together loops and samples from the crappy, unsellable CDs in her store’s discount bins, to layer under her own clever, nearly English-proficient vocals. After three brilliant solo albums for Matador, Solex has gained a new label, a live band and a male vocalist. These additional musicians appear on every track on Laughing Stock, but not in the way one might expect. They comprise just one of the many fragments of source material Esselink cuts and pastes to make songs. The musicians’ presence gives the album a messier and livelier sound than its predecessors.

Kid606: “Kill Sound Before Sound Kills You” SF Weekly

Oakland’s Kid606, aka Miguel Depedro, has made a career out of applying the mentality of hardcore punk to various styles of computer-generated music, from ambient electronica to mainstream hip hop. His most recent album, Kill Sound Before Sound Kills You, is full of incredibly fast, rollickingly abusive techno, songs in which the Kid has turned the beat of the dance floor into the throb of a migraine.

“Ecstasy Motherfucker” is a satire of ’90s rave music, but here the simple, brain-dead beats are pushed to light-speed; even the kitschy vocal samples – “Yo! Give me something to dance to!” and “Beat goes boom! Boom! Boom!” – are sped up to a chipmunk pitch. On “Buckle Up,” frog-throated British MC Wayne Lonesome toasts in the dancehall style about Bin Laden – and also about elephants and zebras. It’s a reggae song with all the lilt and gyration replaced with police sirens and industrial pounding. Throughout most of the album these bland, rapid beats are pushed to the foreground, but with several of the songs clocking in at seven-plus minutes, all of their manic energy is not enough to prevent the repetition from becoming a little deadening.

The Kid is at his best when he takes a break from beating up the listener, as on “If I Had a Happy Place This Would Be It,” a track that combines acoustic guitar, creamy synths, wood-block percussion, and the thump of hip hop; or the gurgling rhythm of “Total Recovery Is Possible,” which is pleasantly intricate and unpredictable, instead of just fast.

Depedro has established a formula for his own unusual breed of club music, but by the end of this record the fact that it is, in fact, a formula becomes all too apparent. Kill Sound succeeds when the Kid defies not just popular taste, but his own habits. For the most part, however, sound killed me, not the other way round.

Originally published in SF Weekly.