Anticon is a collectively owned record label based in Oakland, California. It produces well- known avant hip-hop records, financially supports its divergent artists and is
Doseone>>> "Anticon is six years old, a long relationship. When we first started we were all so desperate about our music, about making it happen. At one point there were eleven of us living in Tim's [Sole] two-bedroom house and it was rancid. Everyone was temp working, no one was making music, everyone was starting to hate each other, and this was the dive into being together. And now it's a business, we're board members and file K-1 on behalf of Anticon."
Alias>>> "I met Sole in '94; we both grew up in Maine. The music scene was almost non-existent. We did the Deep Puddle album in '98. That was kind of the starting point for Anticon. We thought we were going to shop it around to major labels but even the smaller labels thought it was too weird so we decided to start our own label. We put out a compilation and it caught a lot of people's attention. Then Sole moved out here. It just seemed like the right thing to do; the kind of music we were doing was a little different; people here are more relaxed and open minded. So we all moved out here, kept putting music out and eventually everybody could live off music and not workdayjobs."
Jel>>> "As I've been playing the drum machine live [Akai MPC 2000] it's kind of altered how I make music in the room, too. I just want to play everything. Instead of just doing a four bar loop or chunks of four bar sequences, I just want to play a full sixteen bar thing in. I'll sequence them if it's really technical but most of the time I'm just trying to play it in, then [I] add extra stuff as it's looping I'll get a break and each hit of the drum I try to completely chop it up into hi-hats, kick, snare everything that sounds different. Then I'll try to recreate it or create a whole different break. Trying to recreate that break definitely taught me how to drum with the drum machine. I think a big step for me, and the way I write music, was I would make a song that could work as an instrumental. I would finish the song before anyone would rap on it. Dose will give me a loop of something that he thinks sounds cool and I'll make a beat around that, then he'll add to it. It's been rare that he hasn't had something written. With his words it's in his head how he wants it delivered. But we'll compromise."
On making "It's Them" from Music For The Advancement Of Hip Hop>>> "We said, 'Okay, let's do something interesting.' I sat down and tried to match the beats, rhythmically, to his vocal. I was following his cadences, trying to do something that wasn't the same all the way through. It turned into something interesting. A trick with the way I cut them is the kick and hi-hat have an extra hit at the end of the sample so you can play it on beat and it still sounds like a drum break. The SP 1200 is the main thing I've made everything on until now. The No Music was still a lot of SP structure. I have everything routed into the [Alesis] mix board then into the Mbox. I use this Dr. Sample 303 for effects. I send my drums from the SP into the Dr. Sample and affect it with delay or whatever. Before that it was VS-880s. Everyone got VS-880s and we made our music on that. And before that it was just 4-track. I lost a Buck 65 and Doseone project on the VS-880: initialized my drive without knowing it."
Doseone>>> "I've been rapping a really long time. Jesus Christ, ten years. I do a lot of vocal tracks. I never do one or two; it's always ten. It's always pairs of things fading out and pairs of things fading in. I spend so much time laying these vocals that it has to be an intriguing process for me. The downside is sometimes you'll get tracks from me that are a little vocal heavy, but the upside is that I find some interesting things. Everything I've contributed to a track that has given me or someone I've worked with chills has been a product of doing it 10,000 times wrong, sweating."
Doseone's focus now is on Subtle, which consists of himself, Dax Pierson, Alexander Kort, Jordan Dalrymple, Jel and Marty Kalani Dovers.>>> "It's pretty much the mature avenue for me as a writer. I'm one of the six producers. I'm basically the vocalist but we all produce. It's great, I can make music and save money and since four of the six guys in Subtle are full-time employed sometimes we pay for everyone's rent so they can take time off work. We tracked half of the new Subtle record at Jeremy Goody's house, then refurbished it at home in the computer. Just for the texture I kept some of the vocals we recorded live, but really it was all done back here. Jeremy Goody's great. He mixed the Subtle record because it's bigger than we can handle."
Doseone is surrounded by well- worn equipment.>>> "Powerbook G4, Pro Tools 6.0 and Mbox, which is used for sequencing, re-sampling, mixing, ruining, everything. Jel took my MPC and Yoni [Why?] had all my keyboards, so I had nothing but this [G4] for a year so I learned to use it. We all bought computers within the last year and none of us are on the same platform. A Technics table that I pretend to sample off of but usually I just play keyboards into my trusty MPC 2000 XL, which Jel has worn. Look at this — it's disgusting: finger grease all over my MPC. A Joe Meek VC3Q compressor, AKG 414, Korg Poly-61 that Why? stole, Casio CZ-101, three megaphones. I have a slew of shitty microphones, probably twenty. I have my handy-dandy Sony Dictaphone that I've used for eight years without breaking, an E-Mu Systems Drumulator and I pretend I'm Jel when he was seventeen with it, then I have the workhorse that predates my G4 and that's the Roland VS-880. I did almost every record up to a point on that. Started Themselves' No Music. Did the Them record, did Hemispheres, did cLOUDDEAD, and a lot of remixes. Line 6 DL-4: I would use that live for all the vocals and I would loop everything and it was fabulous for that but it's hyper-noisy and the soundmen are not cooperative when you're running your own vocals on stage. They hate that and this doesn't help because this thing's so sensitive. So it's half pain in the ass, half really great toy. I discontinued it and now I use the Kaos Pad. I have the Behringer that I discontinued because it was too noisy. They're cheap if you don't have the money. They last as long as they cost: 200 days. I have a collection of reel-to-reel Dictaphones, regular Dictaphones, a mini disc recorder, the Korg digital 4-track, the Pandora thing, which I really love. All the field recordings on the cLOUDDEAD record, and pretty much everything I've done for the past three years have come off that. Seventeen shitty swap meet keyboards, no one a duplicate. It's a vast collection of unusable, AA powered trinkets. I sample off the TV, VCR, video games. I have Nintendo, Sega, Colecovision, Atari..."
Why?>>> "The Why? stuff is all live instruments. Most of it is played all the way through. Sometimes I'll make a loop but I don't think I've looped myself playing drums in a long, long time. I started writing music by sampling so I think I have that aesthetic of repetition in my music. I pretty much play guitar like a percussion instrument. I layer it enough so it sounds like I can really play. I feel akin to the Microphones stuff where you'll listen think it's one riff but then you really listen and see it's two or three riffs that blend together... but he can actually play. I do take a long time to do stuff. Lately I've been a lot quicker 'cause I've been working with my brother, Josiah. He'll say, 'You're done, it's cool.' My brother's been integrated more in terms of the music. Josiah plays drums for the Why? band and he did half the songs on the Early Whitney EP. The last cLOUDDEAD [Ten] and the last Why? [Oaklandazulasylum] record I thought I was just going to mix it on the computer and then I ended up like, five hours a day slaving over it, adding stuff, taking stuff away, stuff I didn't need to be doing. I think it's just better to let it go. Record it... let it go. We wrote all of our poems for the record [Ten] in the first five months when I moved out here. We'd go out and ride somewhere and be writing, and then we'd come back and we'd have this poem. 'How should we get this across with the music?' When Dave was starting with a beat, he wouldn't be thinking about our poems. We'd get together sometimes and Dave would play me and Adam four or five beat ideas that he had on his MPC and we would say, 'Oh, that one's perfect for this poem. That one's perfect for that poem.' We were just giving each other CD-Rs. I would give him AIFFs of each track. There was no sort of working together. It was a pass it back and forth sort of thing 'cause we each had a studio. I would put vocals on at my house with Adam [Doseone], mix all the vocals, give it back to him. Nosdam's really good at mixing drums so he would mix the drums. I would give him my finished mixes and then he would EQ or compress if he wanted. So each song generally started with my or Dave's basic structure and then each other added to it. Adam did the last song. Tascam Porta-Studio 488 cassette 8-track: it's simple and fast. I like the fact that I don't have to log on or get into any files or anything. Roland VS-880 — same deal. Did most of the Reaching Quiet on this, most of Oaklandazulasylum, a bunch of earlier cLOUDDEAD stuff. These days I'm trying to always do something. Drawing, something. I really don't hang out with the Anticon guys that much. Every once in a while I maybe go down and see what's happening. It's just so nice out here."
Alias>>> "Sage Francis sent me parts because Will Oldham asked him if we wanted to do some stuff. The only parts I got were the vocals and some guitars lines and they were Pro Tools files. I opened them as AIFF files and sampled them and found the BPMs. After I found that I got the drums in here. I do everything on the MPC 2000. I use Digital Performer to track stuff into. Even with vocals for the chorus I couldn't get them to sync up with the drums so I sampled them and had to play them in to get them on the right note. I've always learned how to make music in an MPC and I'll probably never learn to use another machine. I've tried messing around with Reason on the computer. It was so not hands-on. It was too mapped out for me. I'm really lo-tech. This computer, I only use it for Digital Performer. I'd probably have to crash this computer to work on anything else. I'm such an old man. I'm very stuck in my ways. A lot of the music that I do is on the fly. I'll do something and then the next day won't remember how I did it or where I got it. I don't come in with an idea of what I want to do. I just lay some drums down and whatever happens, happens. If I'm trying to put drums or a sample in and it doesn't work I just drop it. I don't push to make it work."
Odd Nosdam>>> "On the first cLOUDDEAD there's not much going on. The beats aren't very long and that's because of the limitations of the way I was making music. I had a Dr. Sample and a cassette 8-track. I couldn't sequence. I had to do everything by ear. For me to make a two-minute beat meant I recorded the beat for two minutes or however long I needed, then tried to find drums that would sync up to that loop and hopefully the drums would last for the two minutes of that beat. Usually I'll run a drum track through the compressor then back into the 8-track and overdrive the trim to get a nice extra crunch. A lot of the drums on the new cLOUDDEAD were done that way. The input coming back into the 8-track from the compressor and I turn the trim up a lot. Then I find some things in the same key I can add that will make it a bit fuller. Jel and Alias, their drum programming is way better than mine. I've always looked up to those guys as far as their drum sounds. Maybe my stuff was strong in texture, but not as strong in drum programming. If you are a musician, if you are an artist, I think that you have to just accept the things that you can and can't accept about yourself and just be who you are. That's the biggest lesson I've learned in my life. I don't play instruments. I use records and it's all based on found sounds. That's what I make music with. I would go to swap meets and thrift stores and come back with a car full of records and just crank out beats. That was kind of my process: 'What can I make with these five records?' Stuff like No More Wig for Ohio, there's an example of what happens when I sit down with a new stack of records and my sampler. To me that's what it's all about: finding these records that have the coolest little sounds on them."
Telephone Jim Jesus>>> "Most of the producers in Anticon have gone from producer to performer. They've found some kind of musicianship. When I write music I try to write skeletons on the MPC to leave room to add more live instruments. When we use this [Akai S20] we're playing it, we're not sequencing. It's really simple and fast, hands-on. No quantizing. No click tracks. It's speed and ease of use that turns me on to equipment."
Passage>>> "You find a machine that you can cooperate with. If you find a couple machines that cooperate together then you end up with something really fun. We don't like problems that we can't see. We're not here to do math. We're still making hip-hop, just a deviated version of it."
Dosh>>> "I record onto one ADAT, eight tracks, which is challenging because I'm constantly erasing stuff and making decisions about the song that can't be reversed. But ultimately this is how the songs get written. The only constant in all the songs is the first step: record something rhythmic, almost always with the loop pedal. Often I'll just improvise a melodic part over the whole song. When I play [live] I basically just make loops, build them up, erase them, build them up, etc. A Rhodes 88 functions as my main voice. I play it with the top off, plucking the low tines with my left hand and hitting the rest of the exposed tines with whatever I have on hand, making beats out of the metallic clicks and garbled, muted low end. Most of the time it sounds good, but if I mess up the timing on the first loop it can really mess up a song. When that happens I just start over! Really pro, man."
Odd Nosdam>>> "Anticon is a very established, collectively owned and run record label. In a lot of ways things are kind of over. We don't really work together much anymore. If anything, we're searching out new people to work with. Why? has a rock band, I'm working with Jessica Bailiff. Or like when we searched out Hood or The Notwist. Everyone has kind of gone their own way and is doing their own thing."
Jel>>> "Mike Patton just got a hold of me to do drum programming, and he asked if Nosdam would be interested, too. We've got five songs that are well on their way. And he finally met Dose and asked him to cameo on stuff."
Alias>>> "Marcus Acher [The Notwist] showed up at one of the shows we did in Germany and we were all like, 'What do we do?' So I went up and told him how much I liked his music and asked if I could give him my album and he said, 'I already have it, I bought it in Seattle.' I was like, 'What?' Then they asked me to open for them in Europe. We're starting to get respect from people we respect. It's not something we ever thought would happen. I'm sure those guys never thought they'd be working with Mike Patton and I never thought I'd be working with Will Oldham. It's been a huge emotional rollercoaster. I have no idea where I'll be in five years. I'm sure I'll still be making music and I'm sure Anticon will still be around."
