Themselves
at The Empty Bottle, March 26th, 2009.

by Justin Valmassoi

“I am worried and I always will be. My blood is hot and this earth is wack, this place is fucked up, and I don’t care what anyone tells me, I don’t care what any Reiki-wielding earth mother wants to tell me about this being some kind of birth place, I will slap the shit out of you. This place is heavy and people go down hard for being nothing except up in the wind.”

And that is a large part of why I am basically a fawning fanboy of Adam “Doseone” Drucker. Since the turn of the decade the Anticon records collective has produced a steady stream of genre-defying albums, stretching hip hop like taffy to incorporate and recontextualize IDM, indie rock, spoken-word and noise into a signature sound, a common thread, a genre unto themselves.

No two members have been more instrumental in defining that genre than Jeffrey “Jel” Logan, whose SP 1200 theatrics are the skeleton and beating heart of the Anticon sound, and Doseone, whose voice and relentless experimentation have made him the most recognizable and polarizing of the label’s core members.

Their body of work as a duo spans from 1999’s Them LP to a collaboration with Germanic indie darlings The Notwist (as 13 & God) and on to the free-form electronic/rock experiments of their full band, Subtle. Each has released numerous solo records and Dose is also one half of the vocal portion of cLOUDDEAD with fellow Anticon mainstay Why?.

Amid this flurry of activity they found time to deliver their 2002 opus/concept record The No Music which basically eliminated the line between producer and emcee. It was the sound of two artists seamlessly in tune with one another, a feedback loop of creative energy that rightfully brought them to widespread attention, and it couldn’t have been made by any other two people. Their collaborative art is as distinct as a fingerprint.

The aforementioned Subtle has been the primary vehicle for Dose and Jel’s creative output for the past five years, the Themselves moniker on indefinite hiatus while they explored deeper sonic textures and indulged Drucker’s less hip-hop, more artistic/philosophical inclinations. It was both unexpected and exhilarating to hear the first leaked snippets of new Themselves material that made their way onto the internet earlier this year. Songs from the forthcoming Crownsdown LP all appear to be consistent with the duo’s oeuvre, only rawer and more rap oriented than they have been since the two first collaborated in the late nineties. “I started teaching hip hop [for Youth Movement Records] and got inspired,” Dose told me. “We’re just giving back to the first music that inspired us. It’s just the nature of the day. We went where we wanted with Subtle. Everyone had increasingly complex lives, so we stepped back. The timing seemed right.”

And indeed, with Anticon, now firmly entrenched in their own aural universe, it is a pleasure to hear the type of envelope pushing hip hop the label made its reputation on, and no two members could have done it better or with more skill. To hear Dose drop his home address and invite any shit talkers to “stop by and get your careers over with already” in the opening minute of their recently released FreeHOUDINI mixtape brings a wave of nostalgia for Scribble Jam freestyle battles and old-school tape trading.

So it was with monstrous anticipation that a milling crowd of hip hop heads, bobbing 59/50s and Wicker Park hipsters cheered the entrance of Themselves onto the Empty Bottle’s much loved stage. The unmistakable horn bursts that open ‘Dark Sky Demo’ sent the crowd from zero to apeshit in under three seconds, and the duo’s time-tested musical interplay did not let that feeling abate until it was time to leave.

It is Dose’s manic ranting and dominating stage persona that garner the pictures and the accolades but the true star of the show is Jeffery Logan’s hands. Jel was the first hip hop producer to play the drum machine live, each kick, snare and cymbal beat out by his fingertips. Watching it in person is astounding. His hands are a constant blur of motion, and the attention to detail that must be paid to building such an intricate framework of sound is staggering. The fact that he rarely if ever misses a beat (and in fact contributes timely vocal interjections into Dose’s neverending word torrent) only makes it more impressive. He seems to prefer anonymity in direct relation to his partner’s extroversion. Where Dose can be found hanging by his fingernails from a speaker column giving soliloquies to painted skulls with a tattered angel wing dangling limply from his back, Jel looks like nothing more than the shy kid from your middle school science class that spent too much time with the lizards. It’s nine years from the first time I saw them perform and Dose has mutated into a mohawked force of nature while Jel still looks like he works at Burger King.

The majority of the crowd had been waiting for this show for the better part of a decade, and it really did seem like they took that into consideration. The duo burned through a combination of new material, classic singles and bits and pieces of songs from their various side projects, no musical touchstone left unturned. Fan-favorites like ‘Poison Pit’ and ‘It’s Them’ become monstrous live, teeth-rattling bass loops and synthesizer tones buoying Dose’s mile-a-minute wordplay while Jel pounds out an avalanche of drumbeats. Ever the entertainer, Dose split his time between impossible triple-time delivery and amusing crowd engagement (including a thoroughly amusing potshot at the Vivian Girls, a campfire story about Saafir and Tupac and a bit of admonishment from artist to consumer: “Would you burn my friend Jeffery with a cigarette? Then why would you burn him with a CD-R?”).

After 90 minutes of answered prayers and avant battle-rap Dose and Jel departed, leaving the crowd to wander home, dumbstruck and satisfied. In his parting comments to his gathered fans Dose called us all to account and made sure no one forgets that Themselves have carved out their own niche in the larger canon of hip hop.

“We went to art camp for six years and you guys let rap go to shit. It sure as fuck wasn’t us.”

No, it sure as fuck wasn’t.