It’s a tricky one, this - anything you say about the music of cLOUDDEAD is probably going to make it sound less good or more absurd than it actually is. Although it is absurd, but only in a way that works. And it is good - absurdly good. Let it in, rinse it round your head for a few hours and you’ll be hooked - a little lost, maybe, but hooked. A unique sound, an experimental one, even, but not in a difficult way. Let’s just say that it might be hip hop, but more comparisons will be made with Boards Of Canada, Calexico and even Grandaddy than with EPMD. More contradictions. Luckily for us, we don’t have to describe what cLOUDDEAD sound like. That’s someone else’s job. We’ll just tell you what it is.



cLOUDDEAD is a trio consisting of Dose One, why? and Odd Nosdam. In theory, the first two provide the vocals and the last provides the music. In practice it’s a little more complicated than that. Anyway, the three of them got together in a variety of apartments in Cincinatti and the Bay Area last year and recorded material for six ten inch singles, each track six minutes long. They invited in guests including Mr Dibbs, Sole, DJ Signify, Illogic and the likes of the Bay Area Animals. Lacking a sequencer, the whole thing was layered up on an eight track. As Dose One puts it, all the tracks were "recorded under extreme duress... very emotional times in our lives".



The group are part of the Bay Area-based collective known as Anticon. A shadowy mix of record label and Red Hand Gang, Anticon have established a worldwide reputation, first through selling tapes, then through low-rent internet promotion and finally through albums by ‘groups’ such as Deep Puddle Dynamics and Them (both of which featured Dose One).



Yet Dose One’s roots lie not in sunny California but in New Jersey and Philly, where he was born and lived his formative years. The best known of the three members, he has appeared onstage alongside the likes of Black Star and D.V. Alias Khrist and has about four full pages of tracks up on Napster - most of them of crappy demos he ain’t too proud of. He has one of the most distinctive vocal styles in hip hop and beyond and rhymes voraciously. US dance culture mag Urb has described him as "an artist who may turn out to be one of our generation’s most important."



Already deep into hip hop, Dose ended up going to college in Cincinatti, which was where he met why? and Odd Nosdam. Why? and Dose happened across each other at the ‘97 Scribble Jam (where Dose battled a then-unknown Eminem) and immediately the duo started working together, first with Mr Dibbs and then as a duo under the name Greenthink. Why? also worked with Odd Nosdam as Reaching Quiet. It was just a matter of time before the three of them started making music and words together, drawing on everything "from day jobs, art school, rappers, race, sexuality, rubberheaded women, rent, you name it".



As for the meaning of their name, it sums up the cLOUDDEAD ethos - not, as may at first be imagined, artsily pretentious, but heartfelt, open and with a self-aware sense of humour: "My sister came up with the name at five years old," explains Dose One, "while making up an unfunny knock knock joke".



Who’s there?