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13 & God

The details are still hazy, but somewhere outside of Toronto in early 2004, on a stretch of uninspired highway leading to the U.S./Canadian border, a computer onboard a large tour bus spontaneously combusted. Some point the finger at the driver (an aspiring reality show auteur), others blame a faulty battery, and most hold a small stuffed fox ac... permanent link

Alias

If it wasn't for Theo Huxtable, Brendon Whitney might might have never left the woods of Southern Maine. Raised by a church organist/hobby store clerk and a fire-fighting jazz drummer on six acres of land in rural Hollis, little Bren never had cable television. Naturally, when the MTV receptors started flaring up in his 13-year-old brain, something... permanent link

Alias & Tarsier

For Brendon 'Alias' Whitney, Southern Maine was home. It's where he started. Where he first ran wild. Where he first heard music. Where he first dreamt of big cities and looming soundscapes and art as something even bigger than the night skies above his wooded town. Music was in the family. Mother was a hobby-shop clerk who played or... permanent link

Anathallo

It’s fitting that Chicago indie art-pop ensemble Anathallo traces its origins to a small Michigan town named Mt. Pleasant. There was no actual mountain nearby, but like most middle-class burgs, the place begged for input from active imaginations—for makeshift raft races on the Chippewa River, bridge dives in the summer, and rollerskating down t... permanent link

Baths

For mercurial L.A. music-maker Will Wiesenfeld, Baths has been a long time coming. The 21-year-old has spent the better part of his days living amidst "pleasant" and "unremarkable" in the suburbs of the San Fernando Valley, so perhaps it's due to a general lack of local inspiration that Wiesenfeld's own work has never fit into a ... permanent link

Bike For Three!

Anticon is pleased to announce a very special project. Bike For Three! is the well-lucked and mysterious cross-continental duo of Canadian indie-rap legend Richard Terfry (Buck 65) and budding Belgian electronicist Joëlle Phuong Minh Lê (Greetings From Tuskan). Shrouded in strange magic, anchored by the heavy stuff of life, and lifted by a mutual... permanent link

Bracken

Bracken is a musical project spinning in a loose and ill-defined orbit around founder member Chris Adams. In another life, Chris, along with his brother Richard are known as co-captains of the good ship Hood. In this latest incarnation we see a side-step/stumble into a puzzling soundworld of future pop, analogue tape trickery, avant drone, loose du... permanent link

Darc Mind

Let me flash my premise outright: Darc Mind's Symptomatic of a Greater Ill is almost without comparison in the history of NY rap. That's not to say it's a perfect record, beyond criticism, that it holds in it the songs of songs--fuck all that. I mean only to suggest that there are songs on this album, "Visions a Blur" ch... permanent link

DJ Mayonnaise

Chris Greer was hunched down in his seat, slim face almost eye-level with the top of his desk, feigning the mild amount of interest needed to pass ninth grade earth science with flying colors, when something actually happened. The kid next to him—Brendon Whitney, the tall one who dressed like Parker Lewis—turned to Chris and asked: “Hey, what... permanent link

Dosh

There he was, this musically lucked child of a once-priest and a near-nun, 12 years old and piled high with a Radio Shack combo stereo, stacks of records, and pockets full of dubbed tapes. It was 1984 and Martin Dosh was orchestrating the soundtracks to his junior high school dances, playing only the choice cuts for the budding romantics and perspi... permanent link

Jel

He was but a young buck, wet behind the ears and not all that wise. But if Jeffery James Logan--Catholic-born Chicago son, one-time Chuck Berry enthusiast, junior high schooler- knew one thing, he knew that he needed to play the drums. If he knew another thing, it was that he wouldn't get to, no matter how much angsty teen protest or sullen-... permanent link

Josiah Wolf

Josiah Wolf, like his younger brother and WHY? bandmate Yoni, has never been able to escape the call of music. His father, a Cincinnati rabbi, taught him drums at the age of 9, so that curly-haired kid could provide the backbeat for worship service. Later, he’d dabble in darker arts (i.e. grunge) and fall in love with the hard bop of Theloniou... permanent link

odd nosdam

Meet David P. Madson, a.k.a. Odd Nosdam: artist, musician, DJ, and co-founder and ex-art director of Bay Area record label/collective Anticon. Through the years, this Middle American maestro of beat-driven collage has championed a sound reflective of his greatest influences (hip-hop, indie rock, reggae, ambient), but one that can only be pa... permanent link

Passage

David Bryant was born in 1979 in Boston, Massachusetts to a steam engineer of the same name and a craftswoman named Carole, then later called New Hampshire home. It was in his six-town district grade school in New Hampshire where Bryant met co-horts, the bomarr monk (Matt Valerio) and teljimjesus (George Chadwick). They were immediately drawn to... permanent link

Pedestrian

To start, "pedestrian" is a name that, by cloaking itself in an adjective suggesting commonness, seems to resist the utility of naming. Let it be said, then:  when an artist is devoted to conscientiously shirking the requirements of character and name, his promotional bio can only be but so complete. But then, to wha... permanent link

Restiform Bodies

Restiform Bodies are David Bryant-vocalist and song writer, Matt Valerio- percussionist and beat-maker & George Chadwick-synth, sample and effects slayer. In 2000 they made a tape called Oubliette, and caught the attention of Oakland's then young experimental hip hop collective, anticon. Once in Oakland ... permanent link

Serengeti and Polyphonic

Rapper Serengeti and producer Polyphonic are Illinois natives with three very distinct upbringings. While Polyphonic, born Will Freyman, was raised amongst corn fields and college kids in bucolic Champaign, David Cohn (Serengeti) experienced two separate childhoods within the city of Chicago: with his mother—a secretary, atheist, and devout commu... permanent link

SJ Esau

Before you meet SJ Esau, you’re going to have to forget a few things you haven’t yet learned. For instance, that at the tender age of 10, he was halfway through a four-year rap career in the burgeoning late-’80s Bristol scene. Erase from your memory the image of a young Samuel Wisternoff (as he’s known to his mother) with microphone in hand... permanent link

Sole

sole and anticon parted paths in january 2010.  for all things sole-related please visit soleone.org.... permanent link

Sole And The Skyrider Band

sole and anticon parted paths in january 2010.  for all things sole-related please visit soleone.org. ... permanent link

Son Lux

Meet a man driven wildly by music. A man classically trained, but rewired with his own two hands. A frequent collaborator, occasional curator and consummate “man behind the curtain” now emerging at the front of something yet unnamed. Somewhere between the concert hall and the club you’ll find his haunting liquid soundscapes, born of hip-hop c... permanent link

Telephone Jim Jesus

Telephone Jim Jesus, born with the far plainer name George Chadwick, is one of the unlikelier products of tiny, snowy New London, New Hampshire.  In that culturally isolated corner of the world, the few artist types, especially those with outcast tastes, tend to huddle around the same fires.  After learning the half-handful of scales and ... permanent link

Thee More Shallows

Since picking up the violin at age 4, songwriter Dee Kesler has spent 99 percent of his life dreaming up songs. There were brief detours, notably a high-school devotion to pectoral form and tanning, and errors in judgment, like the period spent emulating Yngwie Malmsteen. But through it all, Dee has been a man obsessed with sound. If you mee... permanent link

Themselves

After a six-year hiatus, Themselves return on a rampage of heady rap wrung from hardworking hands. Of course, the duo of Jeffrey “Jel” Logan and Adam “Doseone” Drucker are never too far from the frontlines of good art and honest music. Last year, their Subtle sextet released its third album, the critically acclaimed and wildly adventurous ... permanent link

Tobacco

If the details seem scarce, it's because that's how TOBACCO likes to keep them. Hailing from an unspecified burg in rural Pennsylvania, somewhere north of Pittsburgh, he has successfully made a name for himself even as he's avoided acknowledging that name's legal counterpart. As both the frontman of Black Moth Super Rainbow and t... permanent link

WHY?

WHY? For what? Which reason, cause or purpose? What unnamed goal?In abstract, WHY? is the process of adapting to the business of existing. It's the searching for something clearly unreachable, with hopes of finding small significance along the way. It's the attempt to understand what's really going on by ob... permanent link