anticon

Dose One and Jel have been concocting creative sounds for over a decade at this late date. The six year hiatus that Themselves went on has found the group rewarding fans with enough music over the last few months to sate the most voracious of Anticon fans. Working in Subtle (waaaay overrated) and cLOUDDEAD in addition to doing solo stuff, both emcee and producer has remained more than busy. The pair has worked at a hurried pace of late with Jel releasing a few solo discs and a soundtrack as the duo released the freeHoudini mix tape earlier this year and now a full length. Read more

Creating something that breathers and has some sort of emotional heft or life after the moment of its inception escapes nearly every artist the endeavors some release, display or showing. It’s nary the fault of the individual and his or her efforts. One might spend ten hours creating ten minutes worth of music and have it be utterly void of anything but artifice. That’s difficult to clearly explicate in words – but you can see or hear it pretty easily. And when applying this to hip hop (the music as opposed to the culture, although it could be used in that broad scope) it becomes difficult to locate something with legs and hands and shoulders and a heart. There are, though, any number of ways by which to summon some template to work from and wind up with something passable if not laudable. Read more

PrimaryThe first time I ever heard Passage was while driving in a 1999 Toyota Corolla out 271 towards Lake County - Ohio, that is. I'd received The Forcefield Kids as a promo and was just sampling the tracks in order to figure out some angle to get the review started with. But this disc was the first Anticon offering I'd heard that was becoming detached from hip hop - not the entire offering, but certainly some of that Passage album signaled that the Bay area collective had no intention of being relegated to one specific genre - I was right. Once. Read more