Doseone>>> "Anticon is six years old, a long relationship. When we first started we were all so desperate about our music, about making it happen. At one point there were eleven of us living in Tim's [Sole] two-bedroom house and it was rancid. Everyone was temp working, no one was making music, everyone was starting to hate each other, and this was the dive into being together. And now it's a business, we're board members and file K-1 on behalf of Anticon."
Alias>>> "I met Sole in '94; we both grew up in Maine. The music scene was almost non-existent. We did the Deep Puddle album in '98. That was kind of the starting point for Anticon. We thought we were going to shop it around to major labels but even the smaller labels thought it was too weird so we decided to start our own label. We put out a compilation and it caught a lot of people's attention. Then Sole moved out here. It just seemed like the right thing to do; the kind of music we were doing was a little different; people here are more relaxed and open minded. So we all moved out here, kept putting music out and eventually everybody could live off music and not workdayjobs."
Jel>>> "As I've been playing the drum machine live [Akai MPC 2000] it's kind of altered how I make music in the room, too. I just want to play everything. Instead of just doing a four bar loop or chunks of four bar sequences, I just want to play a full sixteen bar thing in. I'll sequence them if it's really technical but most of the time I'm just trying to play it in, then [I] add extra stuff as it's looping I'll get a break and each hit of the drum I try to completely chop it up into hi-hats, kick, snare everything that sounds different. Then I'll try to recreate it or create a whole different break. Trying to recreate that break definitely taught me how to drum with the drum machine. I think a big step for me, and the way I write music, was I would make a song that could work as an instrumental. I would finish the song before anyone would rap on it. Dose will give me a loop of something that he thinks sounds cool and I'll make a beat around that, then he'll add to it. It's been rare that he hasn't had something written. With his words it's in his head how he wants it delivered. But we'll compromise."
On making "It's Them" from Music For The Advancement Of Hip Hop>>> "We said, 'Okay, let's do something interesting.' I sat down and tried to match the beats, rhythmically, to his vocal. I was following his cadences, trying to do something that wasn't the same all the way through. It turned into something interesting. A trick with the way I cut them is the kick and hi-hat have an extra hit at the end of the sample so you can play it on beat and it still sounds like a drum break. The SP 1200 is the main thing I've made everything on until now. The No Music was still a lot of SP structure. I have everything routed into the [Alesis] mix board then into the Mbox. I use this Dr. Sample 303 for effects. I send my drums from the SP into the Dr. Sample and affect it with delay or whatever. Before that it was VS-880s. Everyone got VS-880s and we made our music on that. And before that it was just 4-track. I lost a Buck 65 and Doseone project on the VS-880: initialized my drive without knowing it."
Doseone>>> "I've been rapping a really long time. Jesus Christ, ten years. I do a lot of vocal tracks. I never do one or two; it's always ten. It's always pairs of things fading out and pairs of things fading in. I spend so much time laying these vocals that it has to be an intriguing process for me. The downside is sometimes you'll get tracks from me that are a little vocal heavy, but the upside is that I find some interesting things. Everything I've contributed to a track that has given me or someone I've worked with chills has been a product of doing it 10,000 times wrong, sweating."
Doseone's focus now is on Subtle, which consists of himself, Dax Pierson, Alexander Kort, Jordan Dalrymple, Jel and Marty Kalani Dovers.>>> "It's pretty much the mature avenue for me as a writer. I'm one of the six producers. I'm basically the vocalist but we all produce. It's great, I can make music and save money and since four of the six guys in Subtle are full-time employed sometimes we pay for everyone's rent so they can take time off work. We tracked half of the new Subtle record at Jeremy Goody's house, then refurbished it at home in the computer. Just for the texture I kept some of the vocals we recorded live, but really it was all done back here. Jeremy Goody's great. He mixed the Subtle record because it's bigger than we can handle."
Doseone is surrounded by well- worn equipment.>>> "Powerbook G4, Pro Tools 6.0 and Mbox, which is used for sequencing, re-sampling, mixing, ruining, everything. Jel took my MPC and Yoni [Why?] had all my keyboards, so I had nothing but this [G4] for a year so I learned to use it. We all bought computers within the last year and none of us are on the same platform. A Technics table that I pretend to sample off of but usually I just play keyboards into my trusty MPC 2000 XL, which Jel has worn. Look at this — it's disgusting: finger grease all over my MPC. A Joe Meek VC3Q compressor, AKG 414, Korg Poly-61 that Why? stole, Casio CZ-101, three megaphones. I have a slew of shitty microphones, probably twenty. I have my handy-dandy Sony Dictaphone that I've used for eight years without breaking, an E-Mu Systems Drumulator and I pretend I'm Jel when he was seventeen with it, then I have the workhorse that predates my G4 and that's the Roland VS-880. I did almost every record up to a point on that. Started Themselves' No Music. Did the Them record, did Hemispheres, did cLOUDDEAD, and a lot of remixes. Line 6 DL-4: I would use that live for all the vocals and I would loop everything and it was fabulous for that but it's hyper-noisy and the soundmen are not cooperative when you're running your own vocals on stage. They hate that and this doesn't help because this thing's so sensitive. So it's half pain in the ass, half really great toy. I discontinued it and now I use the Kaos Pad. I have the Behringer that I discontinued because it was too noisy. They're cheap if you don't have the money. They last as long as they cost: 200 days. I have a collection of reel-to-reel Dictaphones, regular Dictaphones, a mini disc recorder, the Korg digital 4-track, the Pandora thing, which I really love. All the field recordings on the cLOUDDEAD record, and pretty much everything I've done for the past three years have come off that. Seventeen shitty swap meet keyboards, no one a duplicate. It's a vast collection of unusable, AA powered trinkets. I sample off the TV, VCR, video games. I have Nintendo, Sega, Colecovision, Atari..."
