Stepping out of the shadow of our peers is never an easy task. odd nosdam is the anticon beatmaker who is best known for supplying the score in cLOUDDEAD's leftfield cult hits. Following their untimely break-up, he's back with a Burner (literally), to clear the air and look to the future...
How does it feel to have finished Burner?
It feels great, but I also feel kind of empty now. It's been my focus for the past two years at least and now it's done. There's a certain comfort you can have when you can keep going back to something and tinkering on it. My life has been pretty intense since I moved to California four years ago. Everything that's happened with cLOUDDEAD and anticon forced me to grow up.
Did you resent the fact that you were pushed to the back on cLOUDDEAD, with attention being focused on the vocalists, why? and doseone?
The nature of music is that the producer is always going to be in the background. cLOUDDEAD broke up after Ten because of a combination of things. Our relationship with Mush played a big part in it for me, but also our relationships as friends was suffering. We were learning how to make music and how to live with each other, and on top of that there was a lot of pressure to do other stuff that didn't feel natural, like tour and hype the record up a lot. On the first cLOUDDEAD, everyone had a role and we pieced it together. When it came time to do a new record we just weren't really thinking straight, like we had issues over money and all the dumb shit that's part of making music that sucks. Ultimately the reason we broke up was that we each wanted to do our own thing. Time's helped us and I don't have any regrets or issues with those guys now.
Burner has allowed you to collaborate with different people. Did Mike Patton try to shit in your hairdryer like he did that time when he was in Faith No More?
Patton really knows how to entertain when you're hanging out. He has great stories - I love to hear about him pissing on Axl Rose's cue cards or whatever. I really didn't know much about him 'til he contacted us. I knew who Faith No More were, but I've been learning a lot of shit about him since then!
Did anything else strange happen during the recording of Burner?
A lot of the field recordings on Burner were done where I used to live; an old Victorian house on 11th Avenue in Oakland. The neighbours below me were a gang, but not as crazy as you'd think a gang would be. But crazy shit would happen - they'd either be beating somebody up or getting shot at or shooting into the air to break up fights. Ridiculous stuff. You would never want to see that out of your front window, but there it was. I sampled some of the gunshots that I heard and they appear on Burner. It's nothing compared to the level of violence that is going on in the world, like in the Middle East, but it's all real. At the end of 11th Avenue Freakout is a vocal sample that speaks for people who passively sleepwalk through life. They know that there's shit going on but they don't act on it. It's like they're programmed. Hopefully my meagre little album can slap some sense into those people.
[Alistair Lawrence]