anticon.
biography
anticon is a collectively owned record label dedicated to scrounging up quiet ideas and tiny epiphanies wherever they might be found. To this end, we make up poems, sing raps, lift drums, and invent albums. So that we might do the impossible and make a living out of following our curiosities, we mass produce our music, pin price tags to its shrink wrapped surface, and float it out into the world.
anticon's waking moments and later lives
anticon's artist collective came together in early 1998 as a loose group of longtime friends and near-strangers bound by an abiding love of both underground rap's freewheeling poetics and the break-digging and collage aesthetics of traditional hip-hop. The name "anticon" was chosen by its first true believers, sole (Tim Holland) and pedestrian (James Brandon Best), for two reasons. pedestrian wanted a name that expressed a certain enthusiasm for the contrary and the challenge in art, and sole wanted a term which didn't have any associations, a name that could be endowed with fresh meanings. And when jel (Jeffrey Logan), doseone (Adam Drucker) and alias (Brendon Whitney) lent their distinctive energies to the recording of the Deep Puddle Dynamics album in the Summer of '98 a recording experience that was damn near holy in its intensity - anticon at once became a thing unto itself.
The accent on personal sincerity coupled with the unbothered spirit of experimentation apparent in Deep Puddle Dynamics were further amplified by the addition of odd nosdam (David Madson) and why? (Yoni Wolf), who both dropped out of art school to migrate westward and join the rest of the collective in the Bay Area of San Francisco. The eighth contributor to anticon, Baillie Parker, is the collective's compass in a sometimes shadowy and always morally ambiguous world of business. Besides its primary function of releasing projects produced by the members of the ownership-collective, the label proudly continues to add artists to its family.
anticon is, anticon isn't
Because the artistic influences and interests of every soul in anticon are as scattered and diverse as the hometowns from which they come, which include the northeast, the midwest, and California, anticon has been obsessively filed and re-filed in a vast cross-section of musical categories. None of these tags: the language of right wing genre politics, radio charts, record stores, and magazines, are worth repeating here
