Themselves and Why? — two artists who have made phenomenal contributions to the Anticon Records collective and who, I’d imagine, are at least a little bit difficult to Google — have teamed up to record a song called “Canada.” It’s a wonderful, haunting track, but also a lot more restrained than either act’s usual fare: strained whispers for vocals and a subtle, pocket-change jingle of a beat. “You’re showing your pinkest parts in my absence,” Dose One coos, sounding too wounded for it to qualify as a real zinger. From there it all crumbles into an unsettling tale of infidelity and melancholy; Why’s Yoni Wolf comes in with backing vocals for a fitting conclusion. You can listen to it here.
Anticon is a record label, a collective of like-minded artists, and also a sort of parallel universe that understands how imaginative contemporary hip-hop could be if it didn’t worry about selling records and scoring Reebok endorsement deals and winning Video Music Awards; if the ingenuity and inventiveness exhibited in the first few years of its inception had continued on this really dramatic slope upward until sounding astoundingly daring and completely otherworldly became the status quo. Inhabitants of this universe will know that the track “Canada” is not the first time its stars have aligned in the form of a Doseone/Yoni Wolf collabo. The two, along with Anticon beatsmith Odd Nosdam joined forces to release a slew of singles and one proper full length under the name cLOUDDEAD from 1999-2004.
cLOUDDEAD’s sound is near impossible to describe, though the term “surrealist hip-hop” cuts it sort of close. The group’s full length, Ten (2005) might be one of the most bizarre records you will ever hear; it is also — except for the last two Why? records — my favorite thing ever released on the label. Ten is not the kind of thing I want to listen to all the time, but when I’m in the mood for it, it transports me to a place outside of space and time. A place equally tranquil and unsettling, where weird, macabre collages come to life and the backbeat of everything sounds sort of like the echo of a ghost wailing inside of a hollowed out bone.
Ten‘s aesthetic — which is slightly less ambitious but much more cohesive than the group’s self-titled album — is that of a cut-and-paste project tacking together a whole junkyard of samples; the songs sound like schizophrenic collages, with sudden and unexpected little explosions of really unsettling pop music. Or, as Doseone may have once said, if one believes a rather unadorned and questionably attributed quote on the band’s Wikipedia page, “Just call it hip-hop.” When I’m done listening to Ten, though, I usually don’t want to come back to the actual universe — the one where most people think that Lil’ John going “YEAH!” is what 21st century hip-hop is all about and that “avant-garde hip-hop” is a synonym for “the Black Eyed Peas.” As the final track of the record fades out in a prolonged drone, a lot of times, I kind of want to just stay there.
