cLOUDDEAD
cLOUDDEAD

THE REVIEW

cLOUDDEAD are an unidentified object, one of the biggest question marks of the current music landscape. Members of the Anticon collective, a group of artists dedicated to the destruction of any stereotype in contemporary black music, cLOUDDEAD, namely Dose One, Why?, and Odd Nosdam, welcome us into the world of post hip hop (or post everything?). It is difficult, almost impossible, to describe their music: imagine modern-day Residents chanting rhymes and staggering laments over beats with ambient sounds à la Brian Eno, and you might (perhaps) come close.

Their self-titled debut, released in 2001 by Mush Records, a subsidiary of Dirty Loop, is as disorienting and schizophrenic as one could imagine: six lengthy suites, all divided into two parts, for a total of twelve tracks and over 73 minutes of music where, among futuristic sounds and pure avant-garde, the litanies and rhymes of Why? and Dose One and Odd Nosdam's visionary soundscapes complement each other in a more than surprising way. It is almost redundant, if not entirely useless, to mention a particular piece (you might recall, for the record, the continuous changing of registers, even within the individual tracks, themselves broken down into multiple parts), nor does a fragmented or block-like listening of the entirety seem to make sense, the debut of our (anti)heroes, for some nerve-wracking, it must be listened to in its entirety from start to finish, without breaks or moments of respite.

Only in this way, amid voices and whispers frantically chasing each other, accompanied by lysergic and atmospheric sounds, can you clear the clouds of the cover and access the world of cLOUDDEAD, a parallel dimension dark and restless, at times excessively tough and disturbing, but, at the same time, endowed with a profound charm of which, without even realizing it, you will become victims, only to find yourselves changed, for better or worse, once you've set foot back on planet Earth. And it will be then that you choose whether to repeat the experience you just had or steer clear... I chose the former.