cLOUDDEAD - 'Dead In The Water

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With new album Ten, cLOUDDEAD have mastered the uneasy art of blending hip-hop with post-rock. So why are they calling it a day? STARSANDHEROES talks to the band's DOSEONE.

If the concept of progressive hip-hop curdles your Nutriment, look away now. cLOUDDEAD have been making precisely that for the last three years, mixing hyperspeed stream-of-consciousness beat poetry with quirky found sounds, lush atmospherics, and an almost Yo La Tengo-ish penchant for dronerock dynamics. Truly, theirs is a sound quite unlike anything that's gone before, and new album Ten builds on their eponymous 2001 debut with weirder beats, more evocative imagery and, perhaps accidentally, what might even be described as hit potential. Certainly, the band's latest single "Dead Dogs Two", complete with mellifluous Boards of Canada remix, made single of the week and of the month in two UK national papers in January.

Trouble is, the Los Angeles-based cLOUDDEAD trio - Doseone, Why? & Odd Nosdam, or Adam, Yoni & Dave to their Mums - don't seem to be getting on all that well. STARSANDHEROES is befuddled to discover that there's no intention to tour this incredible album; furthermore, depending who is to be believed, the band may have effectively split up before Ten has even hit the shelves. Our interview consists of three separate phonecalls, presumably to curb the potential for on-tape bickering: only Doseone, irrepressible motormouth and master of the non-sequitur, is even vaguely optimistic about the band's future. In any case, Why? and Nosdam's calls were sadly sufficiently overwhelmed by interference to render the resulting tapes unusable.

It's worth mentioning that in between the making of the two cLOUDDEAD albums, the band split twice. Doseone explains: "The three of us are stacked pretty high in what we want to do with our music and ourselves, and every once in a while we boil to a crack, y'know?" Right. "With two [people] you can take time, you can choose, but with three it's a little different. The biggest factor is that we were living together, doing music every day, gambling with our lives, not making rent…It just became too much."

So they did what was natural, for the good of the music and as a damage limitation exercise on a more personal level, and stopped living together. "Everybody gradually moved out," says Adam, "Nosdam first. So Why? and I worked together on what eventually became [STARSANDHEROES' personal favourite track] "The Teen Keen Skip"." This seems to have been the standard cLOUDDEAD working method for Ten: two of the band work on a track, then hand it over to the third member for any additional tweaking. For all their differences, the trio have an intuitive grasp of each other's abilities and specialities, and as Doseone admits, the resulting album, with its vaguely oppressive air of uneasy calm, "definitely reflects the course of our relationship."

In the simplest terms, Doseone provides the vocals, Why? the instrumentation ("he's the musician hack extraordinaire," enthuses Doseone), and Nosdam the beats; in reality, all three muck in with whatever is needed for a particular track. "We all try and do what we do best," says Doseone, "but on [album closer] "Our Name", I had a lot of fun doing Nosdam drums!" It's perhaps little wonder they're not on the best of terms right now, if they're so happy to fill in each other's parts...

If cLOUDDEAD even have any musical peers - and they argue strongly against that idea - then Boards of Canada might well fit the bill, along with, say, Madlib, Prefuse 73 and former Anti-Pop Consortium rapper Beans. cLOUDDEAD are all full of admiration for BoC in particular, not least because of the aforementioned remix; fittingly, the two bands first met at a Gil Scott-Heron show. Of the remix, Doseone can barely control himself: "Oh, that was off the hook! I mean, you can ask for something, but you could never expect shit like that."

Very much a headphone album, if Ten has a shortcoming it's the fact that its subtle, seductive nuances tend to get lost when played out loud. cLOUDDEAD are clearly aware that their fanbase are more likely to be listening on an iPod than a top-of-the-range B&O set-up, and adjust the recording accordingly. "Everything we do is made for headphones," concurs Doseone, "We double, triple-check on headphones - that's where it's born, and that's where it stays." Strap on your cans, folks: Ten will give you a new definition of hip-hop, and open up a world of possibilities to rock fans in need of some innovation.

cLOUDDEAD's Ten is released on 8th March 2004 through Big Dada.

Charlie Ivens