ST003

no. 3

FREE BLOOD + SCHOOL OF SEVEN BELLS Go Their Own Way

...Trail of Dead, Arthur Russell Circlesquare, cLOUDDEAD Cut Off Your Hands, Zombi Francis and the Lights Titus Andronicus, Los Campesinos!

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no. 3

Editor-in-Chief / Publisher ANDREW PARKS aparks@self-titledmag.com Art Direction / Design GARRETT MORIN gmorin@self-titledmag.com Associate Editor AARON RICHTER arichter@self-titledmag.com Managing Editor ARYE DWORKEN adworken@self-titledmag.com

Staff Writers J. Bennett, Austin L. Ray Staff Photographer Travis Huggett Contributing Writers Courtney Balestier Contributing Photographers Lloyd Bishop, Shawn Brackbill, Winona Ballentine, Sunny Shokrae, Alexander Wagner, Lucas Wilson

Photo Editor SARAH MAXWELL smaxwell@self-titledmag.com

Advertising, Submissions & Other Inquiries Andrew Parks / self-titled 685 Metropolitan Ave., #1 Brooklyn, NY 11211 718-499-3983 aparks@self-titledmag.com Display through forever (we’re digital, remember?)

Published by Pop Mart Media

All self-titled content is the property of Pop Mart Media. Please do not use without permission.

Copyright 2009, Pop Mart Media

FROM THE EDITOR Has it really been a year since the soft launch of self-titled’s daily site? Apparently so, which leaves me with the task of assessing the damage s/t has wrought thus far, laying forth the direction for what I consider our real-deal debut on the digitalmagazine scene.

Yes, there is a “scene”—a small, about-to-blossom corner of the publishing industry (see similar efforts from Spin, The Fader and Blurt)—one we’re striving to lead as we hone the look and feel of a magazine optimized for your computer monitor.

A year ago we were so excited about exploring this new medium that we delivered a weighty collection of articles that’d take several afternoons to digest. Which is great—if you have the time—but in this age of instant Twitter reviews, searchable Flickr shots and blogs that bring new meaning to the phrase “everyone’s a critic,” self-titled’s staff recognizes the need for stunning visuals and engaging interactive content in an oversaturated online market.

In the spirit of looking back, revisit our story on Death By Audio, featuring custom guitar petals built by A Place to Bury Strangers frontman Oliver Ackermann for the likes of Kevin Shields, Trent Reznor and U2. In addition to the gorgeous photography—which we jokingly referred to as “pedal porn”—we let you play with the effects yourself, right on the page. So far, this story is our most visited feature.

Which means one thing: Starting with ST004 (out in April), we’re producing shorter issues enhanced with photo-driven stories and engaging multimedia content, the kind of pieces a blog simply can’t attempt. That’s why we decided to do a digital magazine in conjunction with our daily site—because everyone that works here loves the format and can’t bear to watch people bemoan “the death of print.”

In this case, death is progress, and we’re embracing it right now, as the issue you just clicked on includes our first fashion shoot (featuring School of Seven Bells and Free Blood), an exclusive (and ridiculously extensive) post-breakup conversation with cLOUDDEAD’s impossible-to-pin-down members (Why?, Odd Nosdam and Doseone) and an invasive but intriguing peek into the Brooklyn art studio of …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead frontman Conrad Keely.

As for those of you who prefer something to hold in your hands, self-titled is planning a limited-edition print annual—more of a collectible art book than a magazine—for late 2009. Here’s hoping we have your attention in the interim.

See you this spring,

Andrew Parks, Editor-in-Chief/Publisher

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1 MM

KLAXONS | Modular’s Nevereverland Festival, Sydney, Australia, 12.13.08 / Photos by Andrew Parks

1 MM GUS GUS | Airwaves Music Festvial, ReykjavĂ­k Art Museum, Iceland, 10.16.08 / Photos by Andrew Parks

DAN DEACON | Brooklyn Masonic Temple, 12.11.08 / Photo by Alexander Wagner

1 MM LOVE IS ALL | Bowery Ballroom, New York City, 12.7.08 / Photo by Sunny Shokrae

Titus Andronicus ..................................................................................... p.14 A.C. Newman .......................................................................................... p.16 Los Campesinos! ..................................................................................... p.20 Zombi ..................................................................................................... p.23 Arthur Russell ......................................................................................... p.24 Gentleman Jesse ..................................................................................... p.26 Circlesquare ........................................................................................... p.28 Oneida ................................................................................................... p.30 Frances and the Lights ............................................................................ p.31 Cut Off Your Hands ................................................................................. p.32

EP Fre e A s s o ci a t i o n

“THIS SONG IS IN F MAJOR BECAUSE ‘FUCK YOU’ STARTS WITH THE LETTER F.”

T I TU S A N D R O N ICUS IC US Chances are, if you’re a Titus Andronicus fan, you were drawn to the band by Patrick Stickles.

Be it his punkish, Bright Eyes-style croon or his outspoken personality, the New Jersey native takes his frontman job seriously. Lucky for you—fan or no—self-titled chatted with Stickles about the inspiration behind the best songs on his band’s 2008 debut, The Airing of Grievances, which XL reissued this past January. AUSTIN L. RAY / PHOTOS BY ALEXANDER WAGNER

“FEAR AND LOATHING IN MAHWAH, NJ”

“Mahwah—a township of some twenty-four thousand people located at the top-right corner of New Jersey—is home to Ramapo College, which up until about seven months ago I made my home and studied ‘literature.’

It is the sort of place where a fellow will nonchalantly preface a compliment about your beard by making clear that he is ‘not gay, like, at all’ or an urbaneducation major will drunkenly explain that ‘niggers only care about smoking crack’ to no one in particular at the top of her voice. That is to say, the students there have shaped it into a hotbed of casual hatred, where they can inflate their own senses of self-worth in the crudest and cruelest way possible without fear of reprisal. In such an environment, it was hard for an idealistic young man like my nineteen-year-old self to not get a little bit hyperbolic with the lyrics to songs such as this one. This song is in F major because ‘fuck you’ starts with the letter F.”

since Elvis Costello had already ripped it off [for the end of ‘Radio, Radio’] the door was pretty much open.”

“UPON VIEWING BRUEGHEL’S ‘LANDSCAPE WITH THE FALL OF ICARUS’ ”

“I thought for a while that I would tell people this song has something to do with Stephen Dedalus [the protagonist of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man] because [in Greek mythology] Deadalus was Icarus’s father, but this song has nothing to do with that. I guess I thought I would sound smart or something. I am a real asshole sometimes.”

“TITUS ANDRONICUS”

“This song is a real thorn in my side mostly because of the ‘Fuck everything, fuck me’ line, which isn’t even one of the real lyrics. That was an incidental inclusion, which was just supposed to be good for a laugh (even though I do stand by that statement 100 percent), but it has since become our most frequently quoted lyric, which is troubling on two fronts: 1) The world at large apparently thinks I have nothing more important to say than that, and true though it may be, [it’s] no fun for me to think about, and 2) whenever the band appears in a magazine or on a Web site, this lyric inevitably appears, and I have to have the same conversation with my father about how if I don’t watch my language, no respectable school district with even the slightest command of Google is going to hire me when I have gotten this rock ‘n’ roll thing out of my system. ‘Fuck me,’ indeed.”

“ALBERT CAMUS”

“MY TIME OUTSIDE THE WOMB”

“I wrote this song walking home one night from one of Glen Rock, New Jersey’s two fabulous train stations. It is about hanging out in the aforementioned town from the years 1985 to 1998. As far as the lyrics, this song is mostly expository, and the music betrays how cool I thought Creedence Clearwater Revival was at the time.

Before anyone comments that they have heard outros similar to the one at the end of this song in the past, I will say that if only the Modern Lovers had done it [on the song ‘Roadrunner’], we would not have, but

“I wrote this song when I was a boy of eighteen, the time in a young suburban human’s life when they are most susceptible to Albert Camus’s particular literary powers. Camus has told fifty-plus years of dissatisfied teenagers, ‘Yes, I understand that nothing is “wrong,” exactly, but that is no reason for you to be completely unfulfilled and miserable.’ A very powerful message, thought my younger self, and I took it as a great excuse to mope about my uninspiring environs and overturn picnic tables with my buddies.

“Here is a fun fact. The last three words of The Stranger—‘howls of execration’—almost became the name of our band at a time when everyone was saying what an awful band name Titus Andronicus was. Guess we showed them, even though it still gets spelled wrong a lot. Show promoters and flier designers of the world: Please spell our name right from now on? Thanks!”

EP

Li b S er v i ce

A.C.

NEWMAN Photo by Lloyd Bishop

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EP

In T h e C i t y

C A R D IF F

By LOS CAMPESINOS! drummer OLLIE CAMPESINOS!

I

came to Cardiff for university. It’s only about a two-hour drive from where I am originally from [Taunton, Somerset, in the southwest of England]. My sister had gone to Cardiff University, so I already knew the city and really liked it. Plus, the extra exoticness of saying I was studying in a different country was a definite bonus! Cardiff is a pretty small capital city with a population of just more than half a million, but it has the ethnic diversity of a city 10 times its size. During the 19th and 20th centuries, Cardiff had a large port that attracted immigrants who ended up staying in the city. Cardiff is rapidly expanding and improving. The docks have been turned into an area with high-class restaurants and theaters—only a few years ago, you didn’t venture down there! Cardiff has a thriving art and music scene, as well, and increased attention to the scene has climaxed in Swn, a three-day music and arts festival spread across venues and studios in the city.

1.

2.

Brecon Beacons National Park About an hour outside of Cardiff is the Brecon Beacons National Park. It doesn’t have any massive mountains, but it is perfect for isolating yourself for a few hours—or even days. On a good day you can see all the way back to Cardiff and all the way up into mid-Wales. Serving the many surrounding cities, the park is full of reservoirs, allowing you to find a spot and have a paddle. Although it can be busy at times, there are plenty of spots where you can go off and think you’re the only person left on the earth.

The Millennium Stadium Cardiff needed a new stadium, and this one was completed just before the millennium. It has hosted big matches such as the Rugby World Cup and the FA Cup Final as well as large concerts by R.E.M. and Madonna.

EP

In T h e C i t y

3.

4.

5.

Spillers Records Spillers is the world’s oldest record store. Still going strong, it’s been selling music since 1894, and it’s the city’s best independent music shop, offering local and Welsh-language bands as well as tickets to local gigs. It’s also the place to advertise if you’re starting a band or looking to join one.

Clwb Ifor Bach Probably the city’s best music venue, Clwb Ifor Bach—or “Welsh Club” as it is known to English people—is a small venue in the center of Cardiff.

The Super Furry Animals did a four-night residency when they released their last album! The venue has three floors, which allows three different gigs to go on at the same time. There used to be a rule that you could only work there if you spoke Welsh. I don’t think the rule is still standing, but Clwb is proud of its heritage.

The Plan Cardiff is dotted with a small amount of Victorian Shopping Arcades.

The Plan is one of the few independent cafés in the city. Based over two floors, the café lets you find a quiet corner or look out of one of its many windows to admire the Victorian architecture.

EP

The book of GENESIS STEVE MOORE of ZOMBI defends PHIL COLLINS and prog-rock.

W

ithin each of us dwells the propensity for both good and bad. And almost any high school graduate can explain that the two are not mutually exclusive. The world is not black and white; simply because one commits acts of great badness does not preclude one from also committing acts of great goodness. This is essential to understanding Genesis’s monumental legacy.

Genesis isn’t lame. I can say this with complete confidence. I can also admit, though, that We Can’t Dance is atrocious. And maybe someone who grew up hearing Phil Collins’s “One More Night” dribbling from every station up and down the FM dial might dismiss the band entirely. But to discount Genesis’s stunning progressive-rock achievements due to a few nefarious, latter-day hits (multiplatinum hits, mind you) is essentially an admission of ignorance.

I’ve argued about Genesis’s worth with many people, and a common concession is that Genesis was cool but only the stuff with Peter Gabriel— the implication being that Phil Collins ruined Genesis. One listen, though, to “Entangled” from A Trick of the Tail (the group’s first post-Gabriel

album) proves that Collins’s writing and singing were on par with Gabriel’s.

And some might argue that Collins actually upstaged Gabriel with his lead vocals on Selling England by the Pound ’s “More Fool Me.” So if you’re using Collins as an excuse to write off the band, remember that he also played drums for Brian Eno, Adam Ant, Robert Fripp, Mike Oldfield, Howard Jones, Robert Plant and Tears for Fears. “Yeah, but what about Buster, Brother Bear and Tarzan?” you say. Just don’t watch them.

So the next time you well up with hateful rage at the sound of “No Son of Mine,” go directly to your local record store and pick up 1973’s Genesis Live. Listen to “Watcher of the Skies” with its massive Mellotron intro and urgent, propulsive 5/4 rhythms. Notice the interplay between Collins’s drumming and Mike Rutherford’s double-neck bass/guitar work. Absorb Gabriel’s leathery voice and the vivid sci-fi imagery of his lyrics. Let it all carry you back to the future of 1972. If you still hate them, fine—you tried. And if you love what you hear, might I recommend the new Zombi album, Spirit Animal, out now on Relapse. PHOTO BY SHAWN BRACKBILL

EP

F IL MING

OUT OF CON T EX T

Director MATT WOLF takes us behind the scenes of his striking ARTHUR RUSSELL documentary. By ANDREW PARKS

“ANY FILM ABOUT DEATH HAS TO HAVE SOME CATHARSIS. I WANTED TO BRING THE VIEWER BACK EMOTIONALLY FROM SADNESS.” Once you got deep in it, were you ever worried about being able to finish the thing?

I’m different than Arthur in that I’ve always worked with ruthless deadlines! It’s hard to finish when you make something out of nothing; the possibilities are endless. I certainly empathized with Arthur throughout the process.

How much of the performance footage is real?

All the performance footage is real; the faceless, abstract recreations are entirely staged.

T

here’s a moment halfway through Wild Combination when you realize what a daunting project this Arthur Russell documentary must have been. Aside from the fact that Russell died of complications due to AIDS in 1992, the mutant-disco/ avant-everything icon left behind scant original footage for a potential feature-length film. Yet director Matt Wolf’s New York University education helped the 2004 film school graduate take the project into abstract, Technicolor territories that any arthouse buff can appreciate. As one of self-titled’s associates put it at a New York screening, “I don’t really care about the music that much, but that was really beautiful.”

That beauty comes from the way Wolf contrasts Russell’s cornfield-wandering childhood in Oskaloosa, Iowa, with the Lower East Side breakthrough—the peak of the post-disco/ punk era that gave birth to both no (and new) wave—that would eventually define him as an artist. It’s enough to leave you hopeful for an art-damaged reaction to all the apocalyptic rhetoric that’s polluted the airwaves since the stock market started plunging. self-titled spoke to Wolf about Wild Combination via e-mail. self-titled: How would you describe your approach to this documentary?

The lack of authentic Arthur footage pushed you to make this more of a visual, experimental film, didn’t it?

The lack of archival footage made it necessary to get creative. To bring Arthur to life, we made evocative recreations with Arthur’s actual clothes.

Shot on Super 8 and VHS, these have an experimental narrative quality to them, which I hope characterizes the whole film.

How much time did you spend casting Arthur’s scenes?

I just e-mailed a guy I knew from a few years back who reminded me of Arthur, or at least how I imagined his body language. He was like, “Sure...whatever.”

Arthur attempted many styles of music, from disco to straight-up country tunes. What are some of your favorite Arthur songs/styles?

I love Calling Out of Context, which strangely never made it into the film.

Any time I hear something new, I love it; I’ve over-listened to everything that’s been released!

David Toop conducted Arthur Russell’s last interview. Looking back, he told you that Arthur’s music was “too remarkable, too individual for its time.” Do you think that’d be the case if he arrived on the music scene today, that he’d be seen as far too experimental for most people?

I think Arthur had the right impulses to self-promote. He had great personal style, famous friends and incredible talent. With MySpace and the other tools which democratize music production these days, I think there’s a good chance he would have broken out.

You got some wonderful interview footage from Arthur’s parents. How much time did you spend with them? Did you ever feel like you were opening old wounds because no one has focused on Arthur like this before, at least not outside of the reissues market?

I spent a week with the Russells, and I talked with them on the phone a few times before arriving. I knew it would be an emotional experience, but I hoped that it could be cathartic, too. I think we also had a good time hanging out and running around Oskaloosa with a film crew. Chuck [Arthur’s father] was ready to make a movie! And Emily [Arthur’s mother] was also a very gracious host.

EP Your film is a glaring reminder of the way New York City used to be, from the apartment building that once housed Richard Hell, Arthur and Allen Ginsberg to the legendary dance parties of David Mancuso and Nicky Siano. As an artist yourself, did you ever find yourself longing for the old New York?

Well, I never lived in the old New York, and I try not to over-idealize the past. People were poor, on drugs, dying of AIDS—it was a brutal time in certain ways. But it was a more sustainable environment for artists, and I certainly wish that were more the case now.

HOW TO TREAT YOUR LADY RIGHT

By GENTLEMAN JESSE

You’ve mentioned that you didn’t get into this simply for the music because you’re not a music nerd. Why was Arthur’s story attractive as a documentary? I mean, it touches on the AIDS crisis, New York during the ’70s and ’80s, etc.

Yes, many of the narratives revolving around Arthur’s biography were a huge draw to me: the queer element and the love story, the cultural history of the avant-garde and underground disco, downtown New York...

Did making this film open you up to other artists?

The film broadened my horizons in terms of how I think about art and the creative process. It’s made me think about the multitude of characters and interests we all have inside.

Arthur’s music has been a gateway for many people realizing that there’s more to disco than the cheesy reputation it’s had since the ’80s. What did disco bring to mind for you in the past?

I was always intrigued by disco conceptually—this experimental social space where people came to dance. And I agree, the cheesy iconography of Studio 54/John Travolta was always a bit of a turn off. But the film educated me about that period, and I grew to appreciate a lot more music and history by meeting David Mancuso and others.

A part of the film explores Arthur’s paranoia and his inability to work with others. Did you avoid focusing on it too much so as not to distract from his greater story?

No, I think I consolidated the anecdotes about Arthur’s paranoia. I wanted to help explain why he didn’t become more successful during his lifetime.

I though it was helpful to express his paranoia after the viewer learns about the extent of his musical interests and productivity.

Did you “get” Arthur’s music at first? As his father says in the film, it’s “music you can’t tap your foot to.”

I immediately fell in love, though I didn’t get how diverse and expansive his body of work was for a while.

Is it deliberate that you didn’t end the film with his death, maybe to emphasize how his music’s lived on?

Any film about death has to have some catharsis. For Wild Combination, I wanted to bring the viewer back emotionally from sadness, to reflect on the meaning of Arthur’s life and work and the impact he had on the world and those who loved him.

First, be romantic. Show off your culinary skills and refined taste in cinema—dinner and a movie. Not a chef?

No problem. Use what you know. Dropping an egg in some ramen will impress the classiest of babes. And the film?

Predator starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Show off by reciting lines just before they happen.

Second, be interesting. Talk about things you know. For example, talk about how great Phil Collins drumming is on the track “Easy Lover” by Philip Bailey. Who would disagree? An alien, that’s who. Definitely not a babe.

If all else fails, shower said babe with gifts. Babes are like big, hot children. So why not treat them like children?

Think about what you wanted as a kid. Buy her a pellet gun, a sword or maybe some firecrackers depending on which state you live in. She will be puddy in the palm of your waterbed! AS TOLD TO AUSTIN L. RAY Gentleman Jesse’s self-titled debut drips with power-pop gooeyness. It’s out now on Douchemaster Records.

fri 04.10

UG STRATEGIES/LPR Presents

The Official

Ladytron/The Faint Afterparty

w/ Tommie Sunshine, FIGO Ladytron/Faint DJ Sets

fri 04.17

sat 04.11

new africa live presents

Meta & the Cornerstones the film ‘African Booty Scratcher’

fri 04.24

Sub City Sessions w/

Juan MacLean

Glitch Mob

thu 04.28 bell orchestre the havels colin stetson

Lazer Sword Sub Swara Ana Sia

fri 05.01

Future rock

Shout Out Out Out Out

patrick wolf

Graham Parker, Eugene Mirman, Josh Ritter & more

tue 04.28

Windy & Carl

Benoît Pioulard Lambs Laughter

sat 05.02

freeland

alex metric (dj set)

sat 05.09

wed 05.06

an evening with

john wesley harding’s

Extra Golden cabinet of wonders

The

Black Meteoric Star Holy Ghost (DJ set) Matt Cash (DJ set)

wed 04.15

fri 05.08

celebration

mono

the wordless music orchestra

(jeff milarsky, conductor)

psychic ills

(Le) Poisson Rouge

158 Bleecker Street | lprnyc.com | 212.505.3474

EP

F I RE

WAL K W I TH US

From who killed Laura Palmer to Dennis Hopper at his most deviant, CIRCLESQUARE tries decoding DAVID LYNCH’s career.

L

ook, you either love or loathe David Lynch. There is no middle ground, really. Not if you plan on succumbing to the surrealistic characters and waking nightmares that drive his disjointed narratives. Jeremy Shaw, the lone wolf in Circlesquare, has pored over the finer points of Lynch’s career for many years now. More than just a simple reference point, the light and dark shades of Lynch’s work seem to cover the canvas of Shaw’s own compositions, especially on Songs About Dancing and Drugs, the long-awaited full-length follow-up to his 2003 debut, Pre-Earthquake Anthem. With a minimal, patient approach that emphasizes speaker-blowing bass lines and intricate details such as weeping chords, haunted handclaps and Shaw’s own seductive whisper, this album makes good on its title without sounding the least bit forced. Listen to “All Live But the Ending,” the record’s 13-minute closer, to hear what we mean. Actually, let it play while you read about the eight Lynch scenes Shaw can never forget. Makes sense now, doesn’t it? ANDREW PARKS

1. Sailor and Lula stumble upon a car crash in Wild at Heart.

“I saw this film for the first time at age fifteen, a year after I’d been in a serious accident. I was thrown from the car and have no recollection except hearing the sound of smashing glass, coming to at the bottom of an embankment and being totally fixated on how I’d ripped my new jeans rather than on how my head was split wide open. In Wild at Heart, the scene where Nick Cage and Laura Dern happen upon a messy wreck—without any real connection to the rest of the narrative—is so freakily on-point with what being in that kind of shock was like that it’s totally unnerving to watch. As the victim stumbling around her dead friends, Sherilyn Fenn utters, ‘My mom’s gonna kill me...My hair’s all sticky’ with her finger literally going inside a hole in her head. It’s truly poignant and mortality affirming.”

2. The woman dancing on a car roof to Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” while Dennis Hopper and friends beat up Kyle MacLachlan in Blue Velvet.

“This scene is a huge influence on me because it mixes music, dancing and violence in a twisted yet somewhat grounded surreality. Watching it, I was almost cheering.”

3. Killer Bob looking for Laura Palmer’s diary behind her dresser in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. “The scariest scene in any movie. I can call this up in my head any time of the day and freak myself out. Beyond Bob being one of the scariest characters ever invented, it’s frightening because the scene takes place in the middle of the day, and you already know he’s in her room before she enters, and she already knows he’s going to be there, and you know it’s actually her father looking for her diary in her bedroom, and it could be anyone’s teenage bedroom, and it makes you think of your father looking for your diary in your bedroom. Fire Walk With Me, being a prequel, is about the events leading up to a murder viewers already know about, yet it’s still tense. When Bob screams and Laura screams, I freak out and squirm. I haven’t watched it in years, but I am pretty sure I’d still have to shut my eyes at this part.”

4. The lady coming toward you in Inland Empire.

“It’s somewhat hard to describe, but if you’ve seen the film, you’ll remember.

A woman is walking along train tracks in the distance and slowly comes closer to the screen until she’s right in front of the camera and screams. This moment is burned into my psyche, and I’ve only watched it once.”

5. “What the fuck is your name?” in Lost Highway.

“Shouting ‘And your name! What the fuck is your name?’ an eyebrowless Robert Blake invasively questions Bill Pullman with a camera tightly to his eye. Surveillance camera replacing the weapon—total head-fuck ensues. The whole ‘I’m in your house right now....Give me my phone back’ conversation with Pullman and Blake at the mansion party is pretty amazing as well.”

EP

THINKING IN THREES

By ONEIDA drummer KID MILLIONS Trilogies themselves don’t rule, but the number three I guess “rules.”

The mortality rate of three-children families is much lower than comparable families with more or less children. Along the same lines, the trilogy of my siblings is the greatest collection of siblings (and hyperbole) in the history of independently produced recordings. Here are some other notable trilogies.

Post-Keith Moon Who albums 6. Lumiére and Company “The entire one-minute segment that Lynch did as part of the Lumiére and Company documentary is intense. In one continuous take on the Lumiére brothers’ first motion-picture camera, Lynch manages to burn a complete narrative movie into your mind—suburbia, police, aliens with Tasers, girls in hyperbaric chambers and all. I saw it at a film festival the year it was released, and the damage was done.”

7. The baby gets sick in Eraserhead. “ ‘Oh, you are sick!’ ” 8. Agent Cooper realizes that Bob has inhabited him in the final scene of the final episode of Twin Peaks.

“My apologies if you’ve never watched the series, but to me, this is as bleak of an ending as there ever could be. I was so shocked that I actually screamed and grabbed my head in total horror, devastated by all loss of hope for the world.”

Face Dances (the song “You” is featured in Wild Rides, a roller-coaster documentary hosted by Matt Dillon) It’s Hard (includes “Eminence Front”) Endless Wire (never heard it)

Charlie Chan films

Charlie Chan at the Olympics Charlie Chan at the Race Track Charlie Chan at the Opera Charlie Chan’s Secret (There are actually 40 or more Charlie Chan movies in the trilogy.)

J.R.R. Tolkien’s much-loved series Farmer Giles of Ham The Road Goes Ever On The Silmarillion

Oneida’s latest album, Preteen Weaponry, is the first part of a trilogy called “Thank Your Parents.” It’s out now on Jagjaguwar.

EP Ti p p i n g P o i n t

CUT OF F OFF YOUR HAN DS HAND Fear not. New Zealand’s power-pop trio doesn’t want to hurt you.

L

et’s play a word-association game. We say, “Cut Off Your Hands.”

You say, _________. Bloodthirsty? Painful? Clap Your Hands Say Yeah?

The answer is none of the above.

So in the interest of managing expectations, meet New Zealand’s Cut Off Your Hands. Sample song title: “Oh Girl.” Sample lyrics: “So glad I found you / And you’re mine.” The band’s music has some octane, sure—power pop that’s 60 percent power and 40 percent pop—but these guys aren’t violent. They’re in love. So wait, whose hands are we cutting off? And what the hell goes on in New Zealand?

The act began as Shaky Hands, but another Shaky Hands (based in Portland, Oregon) called dibs. So the guys—lead vocalist/guitarist Nick Johnston, drummer/vocalist Brent Harris, bassist/vocalist Phil Hadfield— settled on Cut Off Your Hands, the title of their first EP. The phrase came from a newspaper headline about a New Zealand kid who, on speed, cut off his friend’s hands with a samurai sword. “That was the closest to our original name,” Johnston says. “It’s terrible, but most names are pretty bad, really.”

Macabre monikers aside, the group tints power pop with hardcore influences such as Fugazi and At the Drive-In and vocal R&B (“Anything Phil Spector got his hands on”). The result is the band’s full-length debut,

You & I (Frenchkiss), an album of short, slightly prickly pop songs—like the group in That Thing You Do! if those guys had done some lines, then discovered the Smiths. “It’s reflective of what I’m listening to,” says Johnston, the band’s primary songwriter. “We’ve likened ourselves to a group like the Buzzcocks. We’ve taken basic pop songs but applied our energy.”

Girls (specifically Johnston’s girlfriend) are a popular topic. Aside from a few tracks—such as the delicate “In the Name of Jesus Christ,” inspired by Johnston’s childhood—You & I is a lyrical interpretation of their relationship. “It’s all well and good when it’s throwaway, Beach Boys-style lyrics, but there’s cynicism [on the album], which perhaps I haven’t been able to address in real life,” says Johnston before recounting his lady’s reaction to hearing the songs. “It was an awkward first few listens with her—and subsequent conversations.”

If all goes according to plan, Cut Off Your Hands will spend this year touring the United States and finishing a second album, for which Johnston might get inspired by his latest musical obsessions, notably Deerhunter, Fuck Buttons and Department of Eagles. “I’m excited [to] start from scratch,” he says. “There are no rules. I can do what I want.”

COURTNEY BALESTIER

EP Ti pp i n g P o i n t

F R ANC A NCIS AND T HE L IGHTS I G HTS Francis Farewell Starlite would like his songs to speak for themselves.

N

ot much is known about Francis Farewell Starlite, except the following: He was born in Oakland, California, and given a Beatles greatest-hits cassette when he was five. End of story. Other than that, he’s prone to using the phrases “I don’t feel like answering this question” and “I don’t know how to answer this question.”

In fact, the most intimate detail about Francis—his real name, which ain’t Starlite—self-titled stumbled upon by accident after mentioning him in passing to a friend, someone who knew him from “back in the day.”

(We’d reveal it, but that would lift the veil on Francis’s hard-fought stage name and shtick.)

Elusiveness aside, this much is clear: Francis’s backing band, the Lights, is a reference to stage lights and modern electricity in general. With his group, he powers a bastardized blend of R&B and pop, as if Prince and Sade were filtered through the art-damaged spectacles of Jamie Lidell and Gary Wilson. What Francis really wants to do, however, is transcend his influences and carve his own canon.

“My only interest when I am recording is to make the best thing that

I can,” he explains. “I believe that original is better than derivative. It is my hope that people will stop comparing me to other artists once I create enough definitive work.”

One truly unconventional path is the artist’s substitute for a traditional record deal. Francis has waved off several labels for a $100,000 “investment” from the Normative Music Company, a fledgling start-up established by Vimeo founder/Internet celeb Jakob Lodwick that bases its business relationships with artists on the principles of “reason, honesty, independence and parsimony.”

“Clause two in my contract with Normative is that ‘Stakeholder status in Francis and the Lights implies no control over the company whatsoever,’ ” Francis reveals. “There are no restrictions on the investment. Normative will receive 10 percent of profits of Francis and the Lights, LLC, indefinitely.

It is different from a record deal in that there is no expectation or condition that I will make any specific creative works.” If only our expectations were that nonexistent. ARYE DWORKEN / PHOTO BY LUCAS WILSON

l School of Seven Bells and Free Blood ........................................................ p.34 ...Trail of Dead’s Conrad Keely .................................................................. p.50 cLOUDDEAD ............................................................................................ p.58

Two of Brooklyn’s most promising bands, FREE BLOOD and SCHOOL OF SEVEN BELLS, explain why they finally feel fulfilled after all these years.

By ANDREW PARKS Photos by WINONA BARTON-BALLENTINE Styling by LOUIS TERLINE OF OAK

F

or a second there, all of this seemed like a bad idea. The freshly baked bagels, the carefully curated clothing courtesy of Oak and the members of two wildly different Brooklyn bands in the middle of it all—School of Seven Bells and Free Blood— expected to mingle and make nice despite the fact that they’d never met one another before.

All this to draw a parallel between visionaries who left their proven projects—the Secret Machines and On!Air!Library! for School of Seven Bells; !!! for Free Blood—behind for a true calling of sorts. In the case of John Pugh and Madeline Davy, Free Blood’s meant treating every gig like a barrier-free basement show and spiking their slightly danceable pop songs with sheets of noise and dashes of punk-as-fuck posturing.

As for Benjamin Curtis and the twin Deheza sisters, Alejandra and Claudia, well, they’ve whipped up quite a genre-less widescreen spectacle with School of Seven Bells. Just don’t compare them to the Cocteau Twins.

They hate that.

Come to think of it, this whole artists-reinventingthemselves-no-matter-what theme does hold together despite the divergent personalities involved. For the full, unedited story of Free Blood and School of Seven Bells, be sure to read our thorough interviews at self-titled’s daily site. For now, we’d like to present our debut fashion story (thanks again, Oak, for your patience and editing skills) with key in-their-own-words notes about the rhyme and reason behind both acts...

“It’s even weirder with instruments.

We’re just all very in tune with one another. Maybe it’s a twin thing—just how automatic it all is.

There’s really no easy way to explain it.”

— ALEJANDRA DEHEZA

“For some reason, we had a compulsion to make this ‘Williamsburg band’ with friends helping us out. But in the end, the three of us weren’t interested in a band dynamic, so it’s hard for anyone to exist on the periphery of that. It took us a year to realize that the chemistry between the three of us was enough to sustain this, period.”

— BENJAMIN CURTIS

“A woman’s voice can be authoritative and strong, yet it’ll still be considered ‘angelic’ and ‘ethereal.’ That’s the safe way to put it. Either that or you’re a ‘banshee.’

I’m by no means a feminist; I’m just tired of it being an issue.”

— ALEJANDRA DEHEZA

“I felt a need for integrity between who I am and my work. It’s weird when you just throw some boards together and set sail across some body of water, patching the boat up as you go. It’s like that. I wanted to build my own boat with them and make it serious—make it right.”

— BENJAMIN CURTIS

“There was a year of experimenting, finding a method that allowed the songs to come from an honest place. We kept building songs up and stripping them back down, then building them up again....[Now] it seems like we are exploring sonic possibilities outside the party, the morning after [and] watching the sun rise over the barren city streets as the Martin Luther King Day parade comes around the corner.� — JOHN PUGH

“There was always a stringent editing process with !!!, where all ideas were processed through eight— sometimes nine—minds, so things fell through the cracks. Honestly, I always saw [!!! and Free Blood] as two different animals completely. They just moved, breathed and shat in different ways; each scratched a different creative itch for me.”

— JOHN PUGH

“John is a bit more comfortable diving into the crowd. Even now, I tend to hang back onstage—stylistic differences, I guess.”

— MADELINE DAVY

“Sometimes it feels like the fourth wall needs to be broken.

There is too much of a staid, TV-watching brainwave happening en masse at rock shows....I like to be up in people’s business and remind them that they are part of the show, too. It’s more cabaret than confrontation. Not only are we there to entertain them, they are there to entertain us!”

— JOHN PUGH

BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD ...TRAIL OF DEAD’s CONRAD KEELY shares the stories behind his first love: art.

By ANDREW PARKS Photos by TRAVIS HUGGETT

A

ccording to Conrad Keely’s long-held reputation (nearly 15 years and counting) as the frontman of ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, the guy takes great pleasure in smashing guitars and the faces of ill-behaved bandmates. Get to know him, though, and you’ll quickly realize two things: 1) he takes ...Trail of Dead very seriously—every line in his lyrics and every panel in their record packaging—and 2) that attention to detail comes from a childhood-borne love of recreating the fantastical storylines in his head.

As it turns out, Keely is an artist, has been since the tender age of three when he first picked up a pencil and recreated the work of his 12-year-old cousin with relative ease. Contrary to popular belief, he’s not a pretentious one, either. Confident, maybe, but certainly not full of himself to a fault. In fact, Keely just got around to his first art opening this past fall. Intended as a one-nightonly exhibit of Keely’s intricate drawings (photographs by bassist Melissa Auf der Maur were also featured), the event attracted such curious onlookers as Islands frontman Nicholas Thorburn and ...Trail of Dead’s expublicist—the last lingering link to the band’s former label, Interscope.

At the center of all the chin-scratching and winedrinking was a clear-eyed, steady-handed Keely, dressed in all-black attire like some kind of espresso-sipping bohemian—a far cry from the red-faced rock ‘n’ roll mess he becomes onstage.

“ARE YOU GOING TO DO THE SAME OLD CHICK FIGHTING A DRAGON WITH A SWORD, OR ARE YOU GOING TO TAKE YOUR SUBJECT MATTER TO A PLACE WHERE YOUR AUDIENCE REALLY HAS TO THINK?” “Playing live is stressful and physically strenuous compared to art,” explains Keely, speaking from his Brooklyn apartment a few months later. “I still get nervous [at shows], but doing an opening is simple: You hang the art and sit around for three hours while eating hors d’oeuvres. Art was always easy for me. It wasn’t like music, where I really had to struggle to learn how to play instruments.”

Maybe so, but the incredibly complex ballpoint pen layout for Trail’s first self-released LP, The Century of Self (Richter Scale/Justice), was far from easy. It took nearly two years of planning, sketching and storytelling.

“One of the most important things for me is subject matter,” says Keely. “That’s what I’ve really been developing lately—a story behind everything. That’s where the real revolution is. Anyone can learn technique and be a great draftsman, but are you going to do the same old chick fighting a dragon with a sword, or are you going to take your subject matter to a place where your audience really has to think?”

As a kid, Keely studied the art featured on his favorite records. “Some of that stuff looks simple now, like Led Zeppelin’s IV with its drab wall and the picture hanging out,” he says, “but opening the gatefold while listening to ‘Stairway to Heaven’ was pretty intense and deep for me.

“There was a period in the ’90s that really pissed me off,” he continues, “where ‘post-rock’ bands from Chicago all had album art with the band’s photo blurred and the band’s name in a sans-serif font. I really thought that was the end of everything I loved, and the future of music-associated art. For me it’s always been a personal statement that we put as much energy into the art as we do the music.”

Here Keely shares his thoughts on his recent work, including many of the pieces that ended up in The Century of Self’s own gatefold sleeve.

“The story of this one is still developing. It’s the most complex piece I’ve ever done. The middle section that you see is just the nobles on their elephants and their entourage. The peasants and the common folk are going to be on the other sides of them. Originally, this started with the blindfolded woman holding the scales—the classic Greek oracle. The allegory was how rich people depend on astrologers, how it’s the blind leading the blind. There are two Latin inscriptions at the top. One says,‘Cruel leaders do not reign for long,’ and the other says,‘Sometimes it’s better not to know the future.’

“Lots of stories and characters have developed from this piece. The man on the center elephant is the Raj, who’s marrying his sister off to the man on the elephant on the right, a foreign dignitary. It got more and more involved from there, where I kept asking,‘Who is this character, and what are they doing here?’

Maybe I’ll write a short story to go along with each piece eventually.”

“My parents used to eat at Krishna temples when I lived in Hawaii. One of the paintings reproduced at them a lot is the lion-headed deity [Narasimha] ripping open the intestines of some demon king he just conquered. When you see that as a seven-year-old, it can be quite jarring. It certainly stuck in my memory, so I wanted to recreate that.

“This piece is based on an allegory called ‘The Avatars of Vishnu.’Vishnu had nine different incarnations; one was the lion-headed man, and another was Krishna. Since they’re the same deity, Krishna, to me, represents intellect, and the lion represents our animalistic nature. It’s a simple concept, so I didn’t take it much further than that. I worked on the drawing for six weeks straight, though. I tend to work very obsessively, way into the night, and then I’ll pick up again the next morning. That’s why New York has been great for me. I only have to go to the corner to get milk at a bodega. I don’t have to hop in a car and go to a grocery store like I did in Texas.”

“This is purely a line drawing, with no shading [so it’s not as time consuming]. I worked on it while we were in [The Century of Self producer] Chris Coady’s studio, killing time between tracks. This piece was inspired by the movie Howl’s Moving Castle. The story I developed is these inventors trying to develop a ship that floats [in the air]. But they make a mistake, and the ship’s incapable of landing. It’s doomed, forced to travel in the sky forever [laughs]. The picture-disc version of our Festival Thyme EP has people in Victorian garb on the deck doing things.”

“Every once in a while, I try to reinterpret a subject that’s been done by a lot of other artists.

This piece was the first in the blue-pen series. There isn’t much of a story behind it. I just wanted to reinvent [Abbott Handerson] Thayer’s ‘Childhood Throne,’ elevating innocence in a way and allowing me to mess with patterns a lot. This was practice to some degree because I wondered what I was going to be able to do with perspective and patterns through the pen. For me, this one kind of fails, as it’s hard to perceive depth in it. I was still learning.”

“I knew this was going to be the album cover right when I made a rough sketch of it, with the kid looking at the skull as its center point. It’s supposed to represent the moment in our childhood where we become aware of our mortality and death.

“My mom studied all kinds of religions while I was growing up. She always had shelves full of objects like this—lots of decorative objects and knickknacks. I’ve drawn a lot of her Buddha statues while working on still lifes. The same with elephants; I actually have a shelf full of elephant figurines.

“Some of the books on the shelves here are the titles of previous records or songs. Isis Unveiled is the name of an esoteric book my parents owned. It’s by the mother of the new age movement [Helena Blavatsky].”

B

L O O D

B R O T H E R S On the eve of anticon.’s 10th anniversary, we spoke to three of its key founders: DOSEONE, WHY? and ODD NOSDAM of

cLOUDDEAD

By ARYE DWORKEN Photos by ALEXANDER WAGNER

“ I REALLY MISS THOSE EARLY DAYS WHEN WE STUMBLED ON OUR SOUND.” — ODD NOSDAM

ust over four years have passed since Adam “Doseone” Drucker, Yoni “Why?” Wolf and Dave “Odd Nosdam” Madson cut Ten, their first and last LP as cLOUDDEAD. Yet it’s hard to believe that critically adored album—and the string of limited 10-inches that preceded it in 2000–2001 (repackaged as a self-titled Mush compilation)—ever happened. Although all three are longtime friends who still talk from time to time, the trio’s push-and-pull dynamic seemed destined to implode in the studio or onstage.

Good thing cLOUDDEAD managed to transfer that tension into beautifully bizarre music before their unsurprising split in 2004. To this day, nothing sounds quite like their microcosmic back catalog, from Odd Nosdam’s eerie soundscapes—a swampy mix of hypnotic loops and snap, crackle, pop samples—to Why?’s post-everything poetics and Doseone’s refrigerator magnet rapping. self-titled cornered cLOUDDEAD’s former members before anticon.’s 10th anniversary show at New York’s Knitting Factory—an event so loose it led to an impromptu reunion. The following honest exchange is their first official post-breakup interview.

self-titled: When did you come up with your respective aliases?

Doseone: I was always jealous of Yoni because he got to think of his rap name later. I got stuck with mine. Mine came when I was fifteen. I was doing graffiti and liked the way the words looked.

Why?: I thought of mine when I was eighteen...

Doseone: But those three years really helped.

You guys were both graffiti artists?

Doseone: Uh, yeah. But you liked rap, too.

Why?: But I got into rap through graffiti.

Did you use Why? in your tagging days?

Why?: Yeah.

Doseone: When I met him, he had a wet stencil in his hand. The second time I met him, he had that—I can draw it still—that guy in the sun and his umbilical chord, one of his early characters.

You’re still doing illustration now, correct?

Doseone: Well, that was only because of these guys. They always did their own art. And I was like, “Fuck that. I could do that, too.” I almost married a whore who could really...

Why?: C’mon! [Laughs] Doseone: Well, I had a really intense relationship that went really bad.

Why?: An incredible artist.

Doseone: I watched her and picked it up from her. If you share a room with someone, you kind of get better at your version of what they do.

It’s a natural thing. I mean, monkeys can do that.

Talk about the first time you guys met.

Doseone: I was talking about that last night. If you watch the ’97 Scribble battles, there’s this dude with a baldie and a Dictaphone standing in the front recording everything. That’s him.

Why?: I wanted to listen to it later.

Doseone: He’s behind me getting into it. It was wild.

Did you really battle Eminem?

Why?: Eminem and Adam were the two people that blew me away. I was like, “Oh, my god. Who the fuck are these two white guys?”

Doseone: And later on I was crossing campus, that stupid common ground...

Why?: We ran into each other. Someone told me he lived in Philly. I thought, well, I wouldn’t talk to him at Scribble Jam. He’s an out-of-towner.

And then I saw him on campus, and I’m like, “Yo, Dose.”

Doseone: And I’m like, “Oh, shit, no one calls me that here.”

Adam, you wanted to be a mainstream rapper?

Doseone: I wanted to just rap. I was the real thing for the ’90s.

Why?: Adam was evil. He was just really super dark.

Doseone: And I’m going to go back to that. After I’m done with this record, I want to do some battling again.

Lionel Richie. There was no difference to my ears. But then I stopped listening to hip-hop in, like, ’95 because of the direction it went. Back then, though, I was like the only white kid in my entire high school listening to rap. I was known as that.

Did that make you a pariah?

For real?

Doseone: Yeah. The pressure is different for me now. I can’t not speak about it in shaman terms, but now I zone out completely—in another place. I can’t wait to go back and battle these over-clothed pretenders.

Has a lot changed since then in the freestyle battle scene?

Doseone: Oh, that shit now is all pre-written.

Why?: The battle days were very distinctive to that time. It’s not like that anymore.

Doseone: It’s very pop now. The only contest I have ever been in was Scribble Jam, but over time I battled hundreds of rappers in my life.

When I rapped, I tried to be intellectual. And that’s what attracted me to Yoni’s style. He wrote this one poem...

Why?: I was crap back then.

Doseone: You read this one poem about “packing up babies in toilet paper,” and I didn’t get it at first, and then he said it again at the end of the poem. I was like, “Oh, fuck, that’s so dope.” I realized then that I didn’t want to write from my head. I wanted to make more poetry. At the time you were my only poetry influence.

Why?: We got each other more serious about writing.

Doseone: I remember the day you came home with a poem: “Parking meter, bird feeder.”

Why?: [Laughs] That’s so embarrassing. In high school I would write in a journal. Adam was real serious about that sort of thing. Sometimes I would write a poem or whatever just to do it. It started to get focused on music pretty quickly after I started writing seriously.

[Odd Nosdam joins us in the room.] When did you first meet up with Why? and Doseone?

Odd Nosdam: I first met his brother Josiah [also in the band Why?] in elementary school. We went to school together from first to twelfth grade.

The first time I met Yoni, me and Josiah wrote a book together. I drew for it. I remember going to the Wolfs’ household and just hanging there.

Why?: I think I met you before that.

Odd Nosdam: As time went on, Josiah and I stayed pretty good friends, but after high school I didn’t see him much. Back in ’98 I started making music.

Why?: Dave was really thugged out in high school.

Adam: Dave and I were more wiggery than anyone. We were ethnically transposing ourselves.

Odd Nosdam: I had a skin-fade back then. I grew up in a predominately black neighborhood in Cincinnati, and rap was the music I heard all around me. That was the music that clicked for me. I was so young. I didn’t really understand what I was listening to. I equated rap music with music like

Why?: [Laughs] What the fuck did you just call him?

Odd Nosdam: I was much more accepted by the black crowd than the white one, for sure.

In a Wire cover story a few years ago, one of the quotes equated Nirvana to the blues like cLOUDDEAD was to hip-hop—warping the music until it became something entirely new.

Doseone: Well, I don’t think that’s true.

Why?: Adam isn’t a conventional rapper.

Doseone: That was because of always having dope rappers around me and wanting to be different. The kids at our high school went out of our way to seek out the newest shit in rap.

Odd Nosdam: I met Adam in ’98, when I was thinking the newest shit was Dr. Octagon, and Company Flow was the only thing happening in hip-hop.

Doseone: I had this whole shelf with all the far-out shit like Buck 65....I showed it to him, and he was like, “Where’s this shit been?”

Buck has been around for that long?

Doseone: Sole has been rapping since ’92. Buck’s been around since then.

Odd Nosdam: Can I finish my story real quick? I started making music in ’98, and that’s when everything changed. I went straight-edge and sobered up, went vegan. I was in art school. I met Yoni in a record store where I was selling photocopies of paintings I was making of Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley. And they were actually selling. I had this cassette of music I was making.

Why?: Was that me or Josiah? We ran into each other. I can’t remember where though.

Odd Nosdam: Maybe it was Josiah. And he told me you guys were in a band together. I came by a practice and hung out, and that’s where I met Mr. Dibbs. We sat in my car that night, and I played them some early beats.

When you say you were making music, what does that mean?

Odd Nosdam: I had an eight-track, and I was sampling.

Why?: Really dark beats—spaced-out. Real bass-y.

Doseone: We were sample-happy at our apartment at the time. We were looping everything, but Dave had a sound. I was listening to some of that early shit the other day.

You still have all of this?

Doseone: Oh, I keep everything.

Why?: I don’t have shit.

“ SOMETIMES WE FELT LIKE OUTSIDERS IN A GROUP OF OUTSIDERS.” — ODD NOSDAM

“ NOBODY LIKED ME. I SUCKED. THAT’S THE BOTTOM LINE.” — WHY?

“ WE’VE ALWAYS BEEN HOME WIZARDS RECORDING IN OUR BEDROOMS, AND THAT’S WHAT IT’S BECOME AGAIN—DOING OUR THINGS IN OUR OWN PRIVATE IDAHO. ” — DOSEONE

When did anticon. start up?

Doseone: Right before anticon., we recorded as Deep Puddle Dynamics, and nobody liked it, so we figured we’d release it ourselves with our own label.

Why?: We were selling tapes at the time. We worked on it at Kinkos.

Odd Nosdam: This was when the Internet revolution was going on. You could get your tapes sold everywhere.

Doseone: We had as many fans in Japan as we did in Chicago.

Why?: There was a weird culture of tape traders in underground rap that happened in the late ’90s. We met Pedestrian through tape trading. He ran this thing called TrueHipHop.com. It was so comprehensive. Meanwhile, we had nothing technology wise. We went to a computer lab and used the scanner for our first cLOUDDEAD artwork.

Odd Nosdam: Me and Adam got in a car wreck on the way back from that.

Why?: We had to be hustlers to survive in that scene.

Doseone: We were very romantic and idealistic back then. But we’ve come to our prime now, in the least romantic time for music ever.

Odd Nosdam: At that time in the Midwest, there was a huge underground hip-hop phenomenon. There was a movement to start crate-digging in the post-DJ Shadow era. And we’ll never see that excitement again.

When did the anticon. scene transfer to California?

Doseone: It was gradual. Yoni and Dave didn’t move out until a year and a half after I did. They moved in with me and Jeff [Logan, aka Jel]. We were in a three-bedroom with nine people. Jeff worked temp jobs. I hoed it out and worked for Mush. It was a very shaky, strange time.

Why?: Anticon only became legit as time went on. We almost didn’t notice it.

Odd Nosdam: I was art director for five years, and everyone had opinions, and it sometimes really drove me crazy.

Doseone: The mutual era of anticon. has diffused. A lot of us live in our own respective Antarctica, some of us only a few blocks away. Alias, for example, moved back to Maine. We’ve always been home wizards recording in our bedrooms, and that’s what it’s become again—doing our things in our own private Idaho. We coordinate through anticon. and managers....

We’re on different speeds, but if we hear something we like [we share it with one another]. Like S.J. Esau; the same week that Yoni recommended it, I went through all my demos, and the only one I liked was S.J. Esau, and so I called [label manager] Shaun [Koplow], and we signed him.

Odd Nosdam: The way the label went from being the core focus of our lives, I can stop being art director and now put out records by people we really admire.

Why?: We are all A&R for the label, essentially. We don’t run the label.

Shaun runs it, and Baillie [Parker] helps. It’s more focused because it’s one individual.

Doseone: The state of the industry is so that we could only have one person running the label. It wouldn’t work any other way. I miss certain chemistries of how it used to be, but it was also really confusing.

Odd Nosdam: The thing I miss about that time is that we were discovering ourselves and discovering new ways to express ourselves through music

and art. I really miss those early days when we stumbled on our sound.

Doseone: What I don’t miss is all that confusion and fighting. We fought so much. People thought Antipop [Consortium] was like us and Paul Barman was like us. We picked something that didn’t have a place and still doesn’t, and people tried to put it in this space where it didn’t belong. Nowadays, Yoni’s music, to the world, they can fit it in with stuff that they’re somewhat familiar with. But white rap, or whatever you want to call it, is not going to fit in anywhere. Experimental rap, weird rap, whatever you call it—it still doesn’t have a place. While guys like Atmosphere didn’t really go further down the road, we plowed ahead.

Odd Nosdam: I don’t miss the shit-talking with Rhymesayers and Def Jux. Doseone: White people hating on white people. Those guys on the more rap side of things were very self-conscious about us implicating them in some fascist white regime to make rap smart. But that was never the case.

We just liked being around one another. We had no motives. For them, they were still looking for the ghetto pass. But now everyone is more mature, and we’ve since patched things up.

Odd Nosdam: It started when Sole recorded “Dear Elpee.” If that hadn’t happened, I don’t think it would have progressed to what it was. That was the beginning of what became years and years...

Doseone: Well, [Sole]’s whole thing was that Rawkus was a subsidiary of Fox. Company Flow was not really independent either. Tim [“Sole” Holland] called that out, and El-P called Sole “shorty,” and Tim called him “tall-y,” and it got out of hand. I was naive. I was hoping that anticon. would be all these people working together, but there were those who felt too passionate about it all.

Is the driving force for you guys to do something genuinely different?

Why?: We’re just trying to do something true.

Doseone: Yoni once said defending me, “Well, Adam writes something closer to the sun.”

Let’s talk about the birth of cLOUDDEAD. Odd Nosdam: I made a beat, which became “She’s Calling”—the first track on our first album. I was driving in a terrible snowstorm from Minneapolis with Yoni, and somehow we ended up off the road in an embankment. We missed a tree by this much, and we almost died. It was the worst situation I’ve ever been in. Later on, we were at an AAA station.

I remember we were like, “We gotta do this.” That, for me, is when cLOUDDEAD began. We didn’t even have a name for it yet.

When Ten came out and people responded enthusiastically...

Doseone: Really?

Why?: I like Ten a lot.

Odd Nosdam: I think that Ten was more collaborative than the first [compilation] record.

Why?: I like the music on the first one a lot. But I cringe when I hear myself on that one.

Doseone: The second one...the writing is impeccable.

Odd Nosdam: Well, the first one...we didn’t even know the first one was going to come out. We were just making music.

Doseone: I hot-wired the whole thing through Mush. Let me just say that Tim specifically did not want to release the cLOUDDEAD record because Yoni’s rapping. He did not want it on anticon. because of that.

Odd Nosdam: I don’t know, man...

Doseone: But it’s the truth. Why shouldn’t we air out our laundry? I got the vibe that they were iffy about the record, so it was like, “Fuck that.”

Sometimes we felt like outsiders in a group of outsiders.

You once referred to one another as “blood brothers,” but on the other hand, you knew you weren’t going to do another record together.

Odd Nosdam: We signed a contract that [said] we had to do a second album. I don’t think it would have happened otherwise. I don’t think I would have been involved in that album.

Why?: We did Ten because we had a contract to do it.

Doseone: At one point it was going to be a Greenthink record. We had broke up.

Odd Nosdam: I actually got kicked out of cLOUDDEAD. And they did three songs totally on their own.

Why?: We asked Robert [Curcio, Mush’s owner] if we could do this without Dave and call it something different and still fulfill the contract.

Wait...is this getting too business?

Doseone: I’m all about airing all of this shit out. It’s been a long time. It’s all about truth.

Why?: Basically, that happened. Adam and I did three songs.

Doseone: We wrote almost all of it in that period.

Why?: Then we started hanging out again—Dave and me. And at some point, Dave became involved again. There were all sort of weird beefs between the three of us, all kinds of fucking shit.

Doseone: At some point, these guys were pissed that I went out to California. There was shit that was totally intangible and [specific] things. Yoni had a strong current to do his own music, and that was also a huge thing.

When did all this tension subside?

Doseone: I don’t know....I don’t think...

Why?: We get along, but there’s all this weird baggage from the past. I don’t have beef with either of these guys right now, but who knows in the next year.

Doseone: We’ve had weirdness here and there. But that’s just gravity.

Odd Nosdam: We’ve been so intimate in so many ways. And through that intimacy... Yoni and I used to talk on the phone about film and shit for like hours. We didn’t just hang out; we were super-close friends.

Doseone: Well, we also didn’t have a television. It was a weird art house.

Odd Nosdam: Everybody has a lot of friends that you socialize with. But we were more than friends. We were carrying each other, trying to keep a weird spirit alive.

Doseone: We’re just fucking different.

Do you think your relationships are healthier considering your own projects?

Why?: I think so. I think if I was working closely with these guys again, there would be tension....We have large personalities.

Doseone: I’m deeply and permanently attached to collaborating. I’m not a solo guy. On my deathbed, I will not be proudest of what I have done alone. I have no desire to ever stop writing the kind of poetry that Yoni and I write together, shit that is way better than anything I can do alone.

Odd Nosdam: When we first made cLOUDDEAD music, we were so impressed with whatever we did. cLOUDDEAD was a weird phenomenon, the first act from anticon. that broke through in Europe. It was overwhelming at the time. I couldn’t even figure out.

Doseone: When Robert [Curcio] was first trying to explain mechanicals to Nosdam, I think his head was spinning. It had gone way further than we had expected.

Odd Nosdam: One thing I will never forget was how Robert would compare us to the next R.E.M, which I never got.

Doseone: He was excited about us, just in a different way. He liked us as people; he wanted to make us a band.

Why?: I really liked Robert.

Why?: Who knows? I don’t know.

Doseone: The process of which Yoni and I write—that clarity and depth—I’m proud of it. Everybody got the point that we were making something special that would last forever.

What are you most proud of with anticon.?

Odd Nosdam: That we put up with each other and put out great music regardless of our own personal philosophies and egos.

Doseone: The fact that we never quit. I haven’t been to a dentist in six years. I don’t have health insurance. We could’ve stepped away from this because of fear. We don’t save starving children, but we were one another’s heroes.

Odd Nosdam: The kind of music that gives you the chills—that’s better than drugs. The fact that I had that feeling with the same eight or nine guys—that’s special. The fact that this guy [points to Yoni] blows my mind regularly. He’s one of my favorite artists.

We have pure respect for one another.

Why?: I got blown once for being Dose’s boy by this one girl.

Odd Nosdam: We got to open for Mad Professor in Tel Aviv [Israel]. That was cool.

Doseone: Yoni made out with a girl with a serious sore.

Why?: I did not make out with her. I swear.

Doseone: That was intense. I was hanging with the guys who ran that show and smoking weed with them. They all started talking about all the people they knew who died.

Do you listen to one another’s music still?

Doseone: He loved the music when no one else liked it.

Why?: Adam gave him the Greenthink shit....It was basically me and Adam.

Dave recorded one part on the record, and that was the part Robert liked the most. He was into that. And that’s when I think the first notion of us collaborating came into motion.

Did it hurt your feelings when people didn’t understand what cLOUDDEAD was doing?

Doseone: I played it for people, like my father, and people were getting it.

Why?: Nobody liked me. I sucked. That’s the bottom line. I sounded awkward and gross.

Doseone: They didn’t like how we were saying, “Put the gum in the cat’s ass.” Stuff like that was just weird. Everybody in rap goes into the studio with their head down low, their hoodie up, thugging out. We wanted to do something very different.

Would you consider doing something together again?

Doseone: I don’t know.

Odd Nosdam: We go to one another’s shows.

Doseone: I had Yoni over the past few years, and I’ll play him stuff that’s almost finished, get his feedback.

Odd Nosdam: We also have so much distance from one another that I’ll get a finished copy of [Why?’s 2008 album] Alopecia, and I’ll listen to it, and it’s exciting.

Doseone: That’s how it used to be—get records and dive in.

What’s next for you guys?

Doseone: Putting out some Themselves stuff. It’s going to be a big year....I can’t talk about it much, but we’re going to put out an official release, and then we’re going to put out a special project—like a mixtape, but it’ll be for free for the downloaders.

Satiate their downloading appetite.

Why?: I’m putting out another album this year. We recorded enough songs during the recording of Alopecia that we have enough for another.

Odd Nosdam: I’m trying to get back to the essence of making music. I’m trying to unlearn all the worries of making music....

Adam has a different kind of approach to the music industry, a jadedness or bitterness. It caused a lot of problems for me where I’ve permanently scarred my relationships with some people. The one thing I can do is make a good record and go home.

www.self-titledmag.com

Coming in April: self-titled survives Iceland and London, with FLORENCE AND THE MACHINE, BEN FROST, NICO MUHLY, VALGEIR SIGURﾃ心SON and more.