cLOUDDEAD was a trio of white hip-hop artists from the Oakland-based "Anticon" collective: producer Odd Nosdam (David Madson), and
rappers Adam "Doseone" Drucker and Yoni "why?" Wolf.
Doseone and Why? had previously formed
Greenthink in Oakland in 1998. The group released
Blindfold (self-released, 1999 - A Purple 100, 2002).
Deep Puddle Dynamics was a collaboration among Sole, Alias, Doseone and Slug,
documented on The Taste of Rain (Anticon, 1999).
The six-movement cLOUDDEAD (Mush, 2001), originally released as six 10" singles (recorded between 1998 and 2000), offers hip-hop distorted through the
lenses of a dystopian vision or through the nervous breakdown of an urban
werewolf. The sound effects (which constitute the core, not just the periphery,
of the music) are even reminiscent of
Brian Eno's ambient music
and
Throbbing Gristle's industrial music.
This was hip-hop's equivalent of
Frank Zappa's
We're Only In It For The Money.
The variety and eclicticism of the rapping voices (and the loose congregation
that they form) is matched by a plethora of musical ideas, ranging from the
lugubrious drones of Apt A (1) to the
ethereal psychedelic languor of Apt A (2).
And All You Can Do Is Laugh (2) is a mini-concerto for
orchestral and vocal samples, electronic noise and dissonant instruments.
I Promise Never To Get Paint On My Glasses Again (1) blends
dub-like backbeats, pow-wow drums and funereal trumpet drones
(and the string melody of Moody Blues' Nights In White Satin), while
I Promise Never To Get Paint On My Glasses Again (2) tears everything
to pieaces in an otherworldly vortex of voices and electronics.
The two sides of JimmyBreeze constitute a free-form
collage bordering on Dadaistic provocation.
(Cloud Dead Number Five) (1) is an atmospheric electronic poem in the
vein of Klaus Schulze's cosmic music, while
(Cloud Dead Number Five) (2) is another free-form collage of sounds
with a steady industrial beat.
Bike (1) borders on musique concrete and
Bike (2) is, finally, a piece focused on the vocals (ranging from
rap rigmarole to campfire singalong).
The rappers often emerge (rather casually) out of a cloud of sounds.
The "casual" and "loose" approach are precisely what makes Clouddead so
revolutionary. They downplay both the hip-hop beats and the rap vocals.
Circle (2001) documents a collaboration between Doseone (Adam Drucker) and
Boom Bip.
cLOUDDEAD disbanded after Ten (2004), an album that was even less related
to hip-hop. This is how Pere Ubu would have
sounded, had they listened to hip-hop instead of punk-rock.
Their genius is condensed in opener
Pop Song:
Doseone
whispers and hums against a call-and-response of girls and rappers until a
hard synth riff launches the rap proper over a lazy trombone-like beat, which
after a few seconds becomes casual humming of Doseone and the backup girls, which after a few seconds becomes a dilated psychedelic chant,
and so on until the closing grotesque Ubu-esque march over female spoken-word;
all in less than six minutes.
The Keen Teen Skip is a spastic nursery rhyme that gets caught into its own loop until it disintegrates in a cosmic vortex.
Rhymer's Only Room weds a horror soundtrack to an acid-folk rigmarole a` la Holy Modal Rounders.
The beat of The Velvet Ant sounds like radio static noise and the singing sounds like Stan Ridgway.
The cinematic
Son of a Gun opens with a bunch of hippies tries to sing something akin to
the Beatles' Strawberry Fields Forever, turns into a
military song for musichall stage, ends in industrial chaos and
an Animal Collective-ish refrain.
Things are less interesting in the second part, where several songs sound
incomplete or slapdash.
3 Twenty is a mostly instrumental quasi-ambient vignette
Physics of a Unicycle begins like a remix of Beatles-ian vocal harmonies but then turns into tense melodrama.
But, for example, closer Our Name is clearly a song patched up from snippets that were dusted off at the last minute.
Themselves was a project by Doseone and producer Jel that released
Them (2000) and The No Music (2002), which sound like
a post-modernist rewriting of the canon
of funk and soul music.
On his own Odd Nosdam (David Madson), who had already released the collage-oriented instrumental albums Reject (2001), Le Mixtape (2001) and No More Wig for Ohio (2002), tried to bridge hip-hop and shoegazing on
Burner (Anticon, 2005), at times sounding like a psychedelic version of Dalek.
Burner sounded like powerful (albeit cryptic) meditations on the nature
of sound and the way it interacts with the human mind.
The very fact that Nosdam stuck to relatively obsolete technology instead
of fully adopting the digital age sent a message about connecting with
a society that was still largely dominated by analog devices.
Untitled One sounds like Donovan's Hurdy Gurdy Man with hip-hop beats and found voices.
Small Mr Man Pants feels like a deconstruction of Prince's Purple Rain under layers of found voices.
The eight-minute Untitled Two (the album's standout) is a foggy, tense and ominous collage.
Untitled Three on the other hand is a relaxed quasi-ambient piece that
sneaks in a Beatles-ian melody.
Upsetter is pure noise.
The droning nine-minute Flying Saucer Attack is the cosmic-psychedelic outlier.
It's all scattered and sloppy, with highs and lows.
A few guests animate the abstract tapestries of Level Live Wires (Anticon, 2007), notably Jessica Bailiff in Fat Hooks and TV On the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe in The Kill Tone Two. Some of the vignettes are original and
engaging:
Kill Tone, that blends neoclassical harp and piano,
the abstract electronic poem Freakout 3,
the psychedelic mantra Fat Hooks (steady beat, soaring hymn-like vocals),
the blurred electronic lullaby Up In Flames,
the droning Off. But too many of the other pieces are pointless or mere
repetitions.
Jonathan "Why" Wolf, on the other hand, turned to piano ballads on his solo debut Elephant Eyelash (2005).
Subtle was a sextet fronted by Doseone and featuring
guitarist Jordan Dalrymple, keyboardist Dax Pierson,
clarinetist Marty Dowers,
cellist Alexander Kort
and electronic percussionist Jeffrey "Jel" Logan.
Despite the jazz-like line-up, A New White (Lex, 2004) was devoted to
progressive funk-rock fusion with a fixation for the catchy Sixties
but an attitude that evokes a
grotesque music-hall with cartoonish vocals in the vein of
the Residents
(I Love L.A., Song Meat) that get progressively more
demented (Silence, The Long Vein Of the Law).
Only F.K.O. is truly "rapping" in a conventional manner.
She has a bit of rapping but
it's mostly a lunatic Dadaistic ballet.
Further variety is provided by
the ambient spaced-out vignettes such as
Red Wine and Blonde and The Hook.
Having mastered the technique of mixing beats and dense textures,
Subtle interjected psychedelic, glitch, illbient, hip-hop, industrial, pop and even atonal chamber music into Doseone's frantic, demented, acrobatic rapping on
the better choreographed For Hero For Fool (Astralwerks, 2006),
highlighted by three completely different creations:
the propulsive industrial rap of A Tale of Apes I,
the guitar-rock song Middleclass Stomp,
and the exuberant syncopated singalong The Mercury Craze.
The construction of these pieces is always meticulous.
Bed To The Bills displays rap anger amid electronic chaos and irregular
drumming.
The seven-minute Call to Dive is a psychodrama that begins in the
shrill/falsetto tone of the first album but mutates into a tragic rap over
street noise and harsh industrial beats.
The nine-minute The Ends is a collage of possible songs more than a song
itself, a mini-operetta that dissipates in a volley of blurred drones.
Subtle's third album
Exiting Arm (2008) suffers a bit from an indulgence of mannerism,
despite being perhaps more melodic than the first two Subtle albums.
This trilogy of concept albums chronicles the life of a rapper, Hour Hero Yes.
13 & Gods/t (Anticon, 2005) was a collaboration between Notwist and
Themselves (Doseone, Dax, Jel).
Themselves returned with Crownsdown (2009), a much less inspired work.
Meanwhile,
Yoni Wolf devoted his energies to his project Why?.
After collaborations, mixtapes and rarities,
Odd Nosdam resurfaced with
Sisters (2016) and
the ambient albums
Music for Raising (2016) and
LIF (2017).
The EP Like When You Ain't (2018) contains brief illbient experiments.
Mirrors (2019) is an album of sound collages
composed entirely of found sounds, particularly the stately Mirrors II.
Home (2020) is another collection of brief cryptic experiments of musique
concrete.
71minutesofmusictocalmdownwith (2022) is what the title says: 71 minutes
of ambient music.
