Anticon Anniversary Shows.

 

Anticon is turning 15 years old this year and they are celebrating with two anniversary shows in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Both events will feature a stellar lineup of Anticon artists past, present and future including Alias, Baths, D33J, Daedelus, Doseone, Jel, Odd Nosdam, Serengeti, Why? and more.

September 5 - San Francisco - 1015 Folsom - Buy Tickets

September 6 - Los Angeles - Echo & Echoplex - Buy Tickets

The Triumphant Return Of Themselves.

Themselves return after a six year hiatus with new mixtape, album, festival stops and more.

Themselves: Themselves, the Bay area duo of DoseOne and Jel (both also key members of the group Subtle), have returned from a six year hiatus with a flurry of activities and releases planned for 2009. It's no mistake that this resurrection comes hot on the heels of the Anticon label's tenth anniversary Themselves have long been one of the label's flagship groups.

First up for Themselves is a trio of festival appearances, starting with Noise Pop in San Francisco next week, then SXSW in March, and Coachella in April. In early March, theFREEhoudini mixtape will drop in various places around the internets, featuring a dizzying array of guests, including Slug, Aesop Rock, Busdriver, Why?, Buck 65, Passage, DJ Baku, Alias, Pedestrian, Sole, Serengeti, D Styles and The Lionesque. As DoseOne put it, "TheFREEhoudini is an inspired Themselves rendition of the classic mixtape medium, housing a medley of original music, it features every rapper we have ever shared a cause with in the past decade. It is also a gift, for these curious times in the consumption of music."

In August 2009 Themselves will drop its third official full-length album, CrownsDown which Dose refers to as such - "CrownsDown is our statue - to rap as it reered us - and the arch and arrow, of what it is to be us, in a decade of music made and the temperature of these two thousands."

It's also worth pointing out that theFREEhoudini mixtape and CrownsDown will be the 19th and 20th releases of DoseOne's career, respectively.

THEMSELVES Live:
02/28 San Francisco, CA The Apple Store - (Terrorbird / XLR8R Noise Pop Day Party)
03/18 - 03/21 Austin, TX SXSW
04/19 Indio, CA CoachellaThemselves

theFREEhoudini (Anticon)
Dropping March, 2009
Featuring: Aesop Rock, WHY?, BUSDRIVER, DJ Baku, BUCK 65, ALIAS, D STYLES, SOLE, Serengeti, Pedestrian, SLUG, PASSAGE, The Lionesque

Alias' 11th Anticon Release Reveives A 7.0 On Pitchfork.

Alias:
Resurgam
[anticon.; 2008]
Rating: 7.0
Original review

A lot has happened since the release of Alias' last solo album, Muted, in 2003. Perhaps most notably, Oakland-dwelling Brendon Whitney-- who had left Portland, Maine, to hook up with the rest of anticon.'s preliminary influx of artists following 1998's Deep Puddle Dynamics collaboration (alongside Doseone, Sole, and Atmosphere's Slug)-- headed back home after almost a decade out West. Despite a break in recording solo, and moving away from the community that had supported him since the early days, Alias has had little down time musically. In 2005 he released the instrumental LP, Lillian, with his younger brother Ehren, and the subsequent year he teamed up with New York-based singer Tarsier for another full-length, Brookland/Oaklyn, which paid tribute to trip-hop while expanding their combined interest in contemporary electronica. Fittingly for Alias' first solo recording in five years, Resurgam takes its title from his hometown's Latin motto, translating to "I will rise again."

Although anticon. originally provided an alternative platform for geographically disparate but like-minded hip-hop artists when it started in the late 1990s, the label, continually flexible and innovative with its boundaries, has since grown to be equally associated with electronica and indie rock. This unification of genres has been a trademark of Alias since the beginning, and on Resurgam he successfully skips and fuses musical elements from across the board. The opening track, "New to a Few", has its bearings firmly in 80s-era hip-hop and flares with energy and hard-line beats before sliding into vast electronica with the aptly named "I Heart Drum Machines". Here, Boards of Canada-style soundscapes open up the space before collapsing into an upsurge of intricate rhythms and melodic samples that alternately break the flow then bring it back forward. These beats are often fairly stock in sound, but it's Alias' melodic additions that keep the steady pace of Resurgam engaging and refreshing, throwing some unexpected turns into the mix and proving that, stylistically, anything goes.

Fellow anticon. founder Yoni Wolf (aka Why?) joins Alias on the standout track "Well Water Black", where he ties together his distinctive, introspective monologues with a falsetto melody that wouldn't be out of place on a Flaming Lips record, pitching everything against a jolly background of virtual glockenspiel, happy-go-lucky handclaps, and what sounds like the album's only (thoroughly spectacular) live drum patch. And while tracks such as this conjure images of walking down a sunshiny Oakland avenue with jingling pockets and a spring in one's step, Alias' dice have many sides. Fast-forward six minutes and he's back to an airy instrumental that makes room for all the other ideas searching for space: sad-eyed acoustic indie with the One AM Radio on "Weathering"; propulsive urban electronica on "Autumnal Ego"; clear echoes of Four Tet on "Death Watch"; and the kind of euphoric jams one might expect to hear in a European disco club on "M.G. Jack".

While Resurgam is a record of many different moods, and unashamedly derivative of Alias' influences, it maintains a distinctive, concrete consistency. This is largely due to Alias' impressive talent for arrangements; the material is deftly woven with a great ear for detail, and there really is something to appeal to almost everyone. It is precisely this autonomous yet inclusive approach to creating music that Alias and his anticon. cohorts have always supported, and what makes Resurgam even larger than the sum of its parts.

Resurgam Commercial.

Alias' new album on Anticon, Resurgam, streets next Tuesday August 26th. Until then check out this witchy, somewhat scary, somewhat psychedelic commercial posted on Youtube.

Sole Feature In The OC Weekly & Lots & Lots of Tour Dates.

Saved by Lord Byron and Lil Wayne
Sole and the Skyrider Band find poetry in the darkness
By HOBEY ECHLIN
Thursday, January 10, 2008 - 2:10 pm
Original review

Lord Byron and Lil Wayne saved Sole.The 30-year-old rapper—who co-founded the young, gifted and white post-hip-hop collective Anticon—was over it. "I almost quit rapping," he admits. "I was like, 'Should I move on to [writing] books and get a degree?'"

Since it came into being a decade ago, Anticon has existed as a kind of parallel universe of hip-hop: white, bling-free, conscious, sometimes more electronic than soulful, but always interesting, as much like Warp as Def Jux.

Back in '98, Sole was just Tim Holland, a 17-year-old high school kid in Maine with a taste for Beat poets and other alt-lit to match his white-suburban fascination with rap. He was also a computer prodigy, so when he and fellow poetry-slam rapper Brendon Whitney (Alias) decided to move to Oakland and found their own hip-hop label, Holland took a 50k IT gig to finance the venture.

The press had a field day when the first Anticon group photos appeared: a bunch of Caucasian geeks in their thrift-store best, mugging like the Gamers Club in the back of any suburban high-school yearbook. And this when Eminem was hitting. "When people can't figure it out, you get this sort of backhanded criticism, like, 'Wacky white-boy backpacker-hop,'" Sole says, sighing. "Because it's not an easy story. It's a lot easier to tell the Joanna Newsom story," he jokes.

Anticon music, however, is no joke, even if at times it seems so. Unflinchingly indulgent and challenging, its artists vary wildly and tend to reinvent themselves with every record. "It's like a No Limit or Matador, where it's reached a level of respect," Sole muses. "But Alias sounds different every record depending on who he's working with; it could be a girl or a horn player. And SJ Esau is more like the Decemberists."

And Sole's own stuff? "It's not 'beatnik-apocalyptic-jazz,'" he says sarcastically, aping the kind of alt-press hyphenates with which he's been tagged over the years.

Previous Sole efforts have been all over the place, his flow often not even bothering to rhyme. "There was a time when I thought rhyming was really constrictive."

This is when the LL (Lord Byron and Lil Wayne) saved his Cool J. "When I was living in Spain, I'd read Byron all the time, and his rhyming was just ridiculous, like seven syllables," he says. "It's not like I traced rap back to Romantic poets, but I started thinking of rhyme as something more than just clever." That's when Lil Wayne came in. "He did this one mixtape thing, The Drought 2: It's, like, him rapping for two hours. He uses his New Orleans drawl to make shit rhyme that you never think would."

Of 2007's Sole and the Skyrider Band, his collaboration with Florida soundscape trio Skyrider, Sole says, "This was supposed to be my pop record," though from the lonely violins, high-plains melodica and street-person tirades (most of which do rhyme), it's anything but. "Somewhere along the line, it got pretty dark," he concedes. No shit.

Take "Nothing Is Free": "You can't feel new, nothing is free/You can't clean every toilet in the city/You can't be 30 and still making hip-hop/You can't kill God with a slingshot."

"The writing, to me, isn't very cerebral. I'll have six beats going at once and write four lines for each of them, just jumping back and forth," he says. "I don't write every day. What I do is kind of repress everything and just think and read and come up with an internal philosophy, something I can use to sort of reconcile myself to the world."

He's found a perfect backdrop/trampoline with Skyrider. "I'm really into gaudy, orchestral shit—drawn-out strings, brooding guitars," Sole says. "We just kept trying to make everything as full as it was melodic. I guess I'm just a dark person. . . . It all goes back to Beth Gibbons," he jokes, noting his infatuation with Portishead back in the day.

To lighten up a bit, he plans on moving to SoCal after this tour.

"I want a garden that doesn't die every year. Where I live now [rural Sedona, Arizona], it's just like a cultural void. I mean, for fun, people go shooting," he says. "I'm a little hungry right now for tons of shit going on."

01/16 San Diego, CA @ The Casbah
01/17 Pomona, CA @ Glasshouse
01/18 Los Angeles, CA @ The Knitting Factory
01/19 Phoenix, AZ @ Modified Arts
01/21 Tucson, AZ @ Plush
01/23 Santa Fe, NM @ High Mayhem
01/24 San Antonio, TX @ The Roadhouse Saloon
01/25 Austin, TX @ Emo's
01/26 Houston, TX @ Proletariat
01/28 Baton Rouge, LA @ Spanish Moon
01/29 Pensacola, FL @ Sluggo's
01/30 Miami, FL @ PS-14
01/31 Orlando, FL @ Will's Pub
02/01 Atlanta, GA @ Lenny's Bar
02/02 Birmingham, AL @ Bottletree
02/03 Knoxville, TN @ The Pilot Light
02/04 Raleigh, NC @ Downtown Events Center
02/05 Washington, DC @ Black Cat
02/06 Baltimore, MD @ Talking Head
02/07 Philadelphia, PA @ Khyber Pass
02/08 New York, NY @ Knitting Factory Tap Bar
02/09 Brooklyn, NY @ Glasslands Gallery
02/10 Buffalo, NY @ Soundlab
02/12 Purchase, NY @ Suny Purchase (w/ The Apes)
02/13 Montreal, QC @ Zoobizarre
02/14 Portland, ME @ The Space
02/15 Boston, MA @ Harpers Ferry (w/ The Apes)
02/16 Providence, RI @ The Living Room
02/18 Rochester, NY @ Bug Jar
02/19 Pittsburgh, PA @ Garfield Artworks
02/20 Detroit, MI @ Scrummage University
02/21 Lansing, MI @ Mac's Bar
02/22 Chicago, IL @ Abbey Pub
02/23 Minneapolis, MN @ The Uptown Bar and Cafe
02/24 Iowa City, IA @ The Picador
02/26 Denver, CO @ Hi-Dive
02/27 Salt Lake City, UT @ Urban Lounge
02/28 Missoula, MT @ Badlander
02/29 Seattle, WA @ The Nectar Lounge
03/01 Portland, OR @ Rotture
03/02 Eugene, OR @ W.O.W. Hall
03/04 Eureka, CA @ The Vista
03/06 San Francisco, CA @ Bottom Of The Hill
03/07 Visalia, CA @ Howie and Sons Pizza