MUSIC
Supergroup in Reverse: The Afterlife of cLOUDDEAD
/ Ben Bush
11.13.07
ODD NOSDAM
David Madson
During cLOUDDEAD, Yoni Wolf and Doseone would walk together through their East Oakland neighborhood or the BART train’s suburban end of the line, writing about whatever they saw. Always on the outskirts of hip-hop, cLOUDDEAD instead took the sound of the streets literally. On “Our Name,” the last track of their final album, a recording of a crack dealer berating Doseone’s neighbor serves as a stand-in for the band’s own internal conflicts. “And it ain’t no friendship, blood, cause I see when shit went down that what’s really going on behind all this is that dope. That’s what got everybody’s mind fucked up but my mind ain’t fucked up because I’m about to get my money.” Doseone’s lyrics lament the band’s demise: “Oh, what has/our name become…/a guilty pleasure/and Nosdam’s drums.”
On Odd Nosdam’s Level Live Wires, released in August, “Burner” begins with Nosdam sliding open his window after hearing a screech of tires while lying in bed. Shocked to see a burning SUV in front of his apartment, he splutters, accidentally dropping the weighty microphone of his 1970s Dictaphone, which can be heard dangling from its cord, scraping against the side of the house; the resulting track builds off the sound of the dying vehicle’s car alarm.
Urban field recordings are just one method Nosdam uses to bathe his tracks in a lived-in sound. He pours tape hiss, popping vinyl and the 60 cycles per second hum of electricity over compositions of singing Farfisa keyboards, throbbing drones and slumbering hip-hop beats. In the vast bulk of electronic music, soundwaves are confined to the airless interior of a laptop’s hard drive, never allowed to reverberate off the uneven surfaces a physical space; instead Nosdam creates a warm, spacious sound. It’s ambient hip-hop with a short attention span; each track punctuated with meticulous, ongoing tweaking of the layers upon layers of sound. Whenever a drone, a melody or a rhythm vanishes it reveals previously imperceptible elements in the mix.
During the recording of his 2005 album, also titled Burner, Nosdam lived upstairs from a group of East Oakland gang members. “Choke” includes samples of neighborhood gunfire; while “11th Avenue Freakout” uses the startled shouts of a beat-down’s victim as the launching point for a transcendent pop gem on par with Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back” or Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime.” After listening to this track probably 200 times, my heart still thrills when I hear the incredible kick-off drum lick. Recorded in collaboration with Mike Patton and Why? band drummer Josiah Wolf, the song roars and crashes along in a state of exultant frustration before concluding with a remarkably self-recriminating vocal sample from someone who sounds like George Orwell: “I’d rather do something for peace but, alas, I am a coward; I prefer my comfortable home and I don’t do a thing. I hate myself.”
While Nosdam’s samples of neighborhood felonies could be construed as voyeuristic, it comes across as more autobiographical. “[That] vocal sample…speaks for people who passively sleepwalk through life,” Nosdam said in an interview with Undercover Magazine: “They know that there's shit going on but they don't act on it…Hopefully my meager little album can slap some sense into those people.” For anyone who has lived in a tough neighborhood, it recalls nights of listening to shouts and breaking glass; debating whether to call the police, go back to sleep or open the window and yell back.
David Madson
During cLOUDDEAD, Yoni Wolf and Doseone would walk together through their East Oakland neighborhood or the BART train’s suburban end of the line, writing about whatever they saw. Always on the outskirts of hip-hop, cLOUDDEAD instead took the sound of the streets literally. On “Our Name,” the last track of their final album, a recording of a crack dealer berating Doseone’s neighbor serves as a stand-in for the band’s own internal conflicts. “And it ain’t no friendship, blood, cause I see when shit went down that what’s really going on behind all this is that dope. That’s what got everybody’s mind fucked up but my mind ain’t fucked up because I’m about to get my money.” Doseone’s lyrics lament the band’s demise: “Oh, what has/our name become…/a guilty pleasure/and Nosdam’s drums.”
On Odd Nosdam’s Level Live Wires, released in August, “Burner” begins with Nosdam sliding open his window after hearing a screech of tires while lying in bed. Shocked to see a burning SUV in front of his apartment, he splutters, accidentally dropping the weighty microphone of his 1970s Dictaphone, which can be heard dangling from its cord, scraping against the side of the house; the resulting track builds off the sound of the dying vehicle’s car alarm.
Urban field recordings are just one method Nosdam uses to bathe his tracks in a lived-in sound. He pours tape hiss, popping vinyl and the 60 cycles per second hum of electricity over compositions of singing Farfisa keyboards, throbbing drones and slumbering hip-hop beats. In the vast bulk of electronic music, soundwaves are confined to the airless interior of a laptop’s hard drive, never allowed to reverberate off the uneven surfaces a physical space; instead Nosdam creates a warm, spacious sound. It’s ambient hip-hop with a short attention span; each track punctuated with meticulous, ongoing tweaking of the layers upon layers of sound. Whenever a drone, a melody or a rhythm vanishes it reveals previously imperceptible elements in the mix.
During the recording of his 2005 album, also titled Burner, Nosdam lived upstairs from a group of East Oakland gang members. “Choke” includes samples of neighborhood gunfire; while “11th Avenue Freakout” uses the startled shouts of a beat-down’s victim as the launching point for a transcendent pop gem on par with Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back” or Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime.” After listening to this track probably 200 times, my heart still thrills when I hear the incredible kick-off drum lick. Recorded in collaboration with Mike Patton and Why? band drummer Josiah Wolf, the song roars and crashes along in a state of exultant frustration before concluding with a remarkably self-recriminating vocal sample from someone who sounds like George Orwell: “I’d rather do something for peace but, alas, I am a coward; I prefer my comfortable home and I don’t do a thing. I hate myself.”
While Nosdam’s samples of neighborhood felonies could be construed as voyeuristic, it comes across as more autobiographical. “[That] vocal sample…speaks for people who passively sleepwalk through life,” Nosdam said in an interview with Undercover Magazine: “They know that there's shit going on but they don't act on it…Hopefully my meager little album can slap some sense into those people.” For anyone who has lived in a tough neighborhood, it recalls nights of listening to shouts and breaking glass; debating whether to call the police, go back to sleep or open the window and yell back.
