anticon's waking moments and later livesanticon's artist collective came together in early 1998 as a loose group of longtime friends and near-strangers bound by an abiding love of both underground rap's freewheeling poetics and the break-digging and collage aesthetics of traditional hip-hop. The name 'anticon' was chosen by its first true believers, sole (Tim Holland) and pedestrian (James Brandon Best), for two reasons: pedestrian wanted a name that expressed a certain enthusiasm for the contrary and the challenging in art, and sole wanted a term that didn't have any associations, a name that could be endowed with fresh meanings.
And when jel (Jeffrey Logan), doseone (Adam Drucker) and alias (Brendon Whitney) lent their distinctive energies to the recording of the Deep Puddle Dynamics album in the summer of '98--a recording experience that was damn near holy in its intensity--anticon at once became a thing unto itself. The qualities apparent in the Deep Puddle Dynamics album--its accent on personal sincerity coupled with its unbothered spirit of experimentation- were further amplified by the addition of odd nosdam (David Madson) and why? (Yoni Wolf), who both dropped out of art school to migrate westward and join the rest of the collective in the Bay Area.
The eighth contributor to anticon, Baillie Parker, is the collective's compass in a sometimes shadowy and always morally ambiguous world of business. Besides its primary function of releasing projects produced by the members of the ownership-collective, the label proudly continues to add artists to its family.
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