Editor’s note: Over the course of this year, we’re publishing a series of essays about the rap albums that defined 2001, both creatively and industrially, and whether they predicted or were abandoned during the quarter-century to follow. See also: Tech N9ne’s
Anghellic, Cannibal Ox’s The Cold Vein, Jay-Z’s The Blueprint, and The Coup’s Party Music.
The following is an excerpt from Joseph Rathgeber’s Catch Us Before We Fall Off: a [ch]oral history of anticon, a two-volume oral history and analysis of anticon to be published September 29, 2026 through Caltrops Press. For further reading, please see our recent interview with doseone.
Music journalists didn’t know what to make of cLOUDDEAD, so they made everything of cLOUDDEAD. The group’s apartment recordings were let loose into a world itching to narrow them down into niches and assign a name to what they heard. Those music journalists—Eden-dwelling Adams one and all—felt the need to assign a name to every beast of the field. Linnaeus listeners insisting on taxonomy. During a BBC Radio 1 Peel Session in July 2002, doseone altered the lyrics to “Me and People” from his album Circle: “So, Jesus and I go out to dinner, and he won’t stop asking me about what genre I am…” dose once told Robert Geary for San Francisco-based Grooves magazine, “We’ve been trying to think up the genre nickname first but that’s harder than it seems...goth-hop makes me laugh...so does ‘plugged in campfire music’...‘posthop’ seems to offer the most significant description of what we undo.” This was likely the most generous a group member was to the search. “What we undo,” dose teased. But cLOUDDEAD was Unnameable, only named from the mouth of babes—dose’s kid sister, in fact. Every child’s knock-knock joke is a Dadaist mantra, and the punchline of dose’s sister’s was “cloud dead.” “She kinda blurted that out once in the car,” dose told ukhh.com. “It just rang perfect for the way we all feel often—it’s that kinda half-empty, half-full thing that we’re always as humans struggling with.”
Like Samuel Beckett’s narrator in The Unnamable, cLOUDDEAD provoked questions of authorship and the dual search to name and refuse naming. There was no shortage of attempts on their poet-head. A concordance of subgenre coinages from contemporary publications is unflagging, as if to suggest not-naming would risk not-knowing:
art-hoppers
art-rap
atmospheric-hop
avant-hop collage-pop
Dada-hop
dream-hop
drip-hop
psychedelic hip-hop
post-hop
sonic Situationist manifesto
space-rock-hop
un-hop
wall-paper-hop
Press people repeatedly labeled the group schizoid (or some variant thereof), likely a projection of their own discomforts stemming from cLOUDDEAD’s unnameability. cLOUDDEAD refused the definition-death; they were dedicated to an ever-evolution. The music presented “Voices! // multiple and inarticulate,” in William Carlos Williams’ words from Paterson (1946). Voices that are heard “clattering loudly… to / the clouds.”
The name bestowed upon the group by an innocent child was perfectly random and righteous: “cloud dead”—almost clouded, suggestive of “obscured,” which is why we ask for clarification (“cloud dead, who?” says the apprehensive person to the door-knocking solicitor). Clouds dissipate, but do they die? We’re unfamiliar with this phenomenon. But we feel a threat in the consonance of those three, successive, drilling ds. An aggressive knock rapping at our chamber door, yet the stylization of the name—if we could see it—suggests the “all caps” loudness might be diminished to a whisper, if only the other letters could follow the lower-case c’s lead.
Despite the obfuscation, the unconscious intent, the sacred mysteries of randomized word arrangements, one thing is clear: Odd Nosdam’s involvement in cLOUDDEAD was integral. The contribution of his sound is what makes cLOUDDEAD, is what differentiates the group’s work from Greenthink, doseone and Yoni Wolf’s initial collaborative project. “Dave [Odd Nosdam] was the aesthetic master,” Yoni has said. “Dave changed the game for us. He had a totally different aesthetic. Dave was into all kinds of indie rock, all kinds of space rock—moody shit.” Nosdam told Grooves: “I’ve always had the vision of what cLOUDDEAD could be, both sonically and aesthetically…. [T]he ‘cLOUDDEAD sound’ came from inspired eight-track tinkerings in my bedroom, which led to a more serious vocal approach from doseone and Why? [Yoni Wolf], which inspired me to go even further with this ‘sound.’”
Odd Nosdam rises from a long tradition of tinkerers within hip-hop. The knowledge gained by the tinkerers of yore ushered in a revolution of sound. Kool Herc was a sci-fi, hi-fi tinkerer: a sci-hi-fi-entist of the highest order. He altered his father’s soundsystem to fulfill its power potential by hacking speaker wires and channel knobs. Nosdam explored and honed his own sound between 1998 and 1999, evidenced on both his anecdoticselfportrait and Plan 9… Meat Your Hypnotis tapes.
Near the beginning of Watch Me Jumpstart (1995/1998), Banks Tarver’s lo-fi documentary about Guided By Voices, an interview clip with Robert Pollard fades into the next frame: a small American flag flapping in the wind, staked to the front of the hood of a car driving through Dayton, Ohio. For a moment, the flag and Pollard’s face appear in a split-screen. A replica of the ephemeral frame re-emerges on the cover of Plan 9. Under yellow light, Nosdam snaps a photograph of himself in the bathroom mirror of a AAA station in Madison, Wisconsin after traveling to Minneapolis for a New Year’s Eve show as 1998 collapsed into 1999. The image is turned sideways, and an American flag, once hanging downward at the doorway, now defies gravity and flies forward.
YONI WOLF: We played a show at First Ave [in Minneapolis] as Greenthink. I don’t think I actually rapped. I maybe went and played drums for dose. We had just put out Blindfold. That trip was the first time I met Slug.
ODD NOSDAM: When we left Minneapolis that night, we drove to Chicago, which was a fairly long drive. We hit black ice and flew off the fucking highway—nearly hit two trees. Blew out all four tires on Jeff’s [Jel] mom’s car. We got picked up by AAA.
doseone: Jeff swerved real quick on an icy road just for pissing people off for fucking with the radio. We went off the rails and smashed into a tree and should have died but didn’t. I was sitting on the hump with no seatbelt but was fine. It was interesting and bonding. That’s actually how Jeff stopped hating Dave [Odd Nosdam]. I’m going to project and throw that out there. It was spooky and creepy. It unified us. It was a good experience, but it was also intense. To be honest, it was a baby step toward being on tour, which was hard on all of us as people, as individuals, and rewarding as artists.
Nosdam described to Peter Agoston on The House List podcast how significant the accident was to them as a unit. “We had already recorded ‘apt. A (1),’ and Adam already had the name,” he explained. “That night, the three of us were like, Okay, when we get back to Cincinnati, we’re gonna do this cLOUDDEAD thing full-on. This was before Mush [Records]. anticon was still bubbling up as a collective.” Several of the beats that appear on Plan 9 would be utilized on cLOUDDEAD.
Plan 9… opens with an abrasive, flatulent horn. Jugband jammed into Jupiter’s anticyclonic storm. The answering machine screeches: leave a message after the beep. A strange beast cries. The scores of B movies scored into flesh. Muzak run amok. The drums are sandpaper grit rubbed against your daddy’s five o’clock shadow. These drums—filthy, upturned bucket percussion—are a constant. Nosdam would become known for the griminess of his kicks and snares, the bristle and fuzz of his samples. In Hip-Hop Connection magazine, dose explained how Nosdam might “loop something off tape and it won’t be nearly dirty enough, so he’ll dub it twice to another tape.”
ODD NOSDAM: There’s no real secret to my drum sound.
