Odd Nosdam interview by Dan Rule

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Relative to his extraordinary sonic achievements, David P. Madson is one of the truly unsung auteurs of the experimental underground. Working under the creative guise of Odd Nosdam, his grit-scarred, analogue and artefact-heavy production aesthetic has underscored some of experimental hip-hop’ most significant and progressive moments. But his often complex and abrasive solo material has largely slipped under the radar. A product of Dictaphone field-recordings, rough-cut samples, digital static and 8-track tape-hiss, his work is the stuff of capturing, deconstructing and recontextualising aural artefact; of allowing the machinations, mechanisms and mistakes of recording process to leave their very tactile mark on the final cut. But according to Madson – who released fourth official solo record Level Live Wires this August – his take on sound-collage is unassuming and unplanned at best. Quite simply, it is about capturing moments of chance – about harnessing feeling, happenstance and flashes of memory – nothing more, nothing less.

A gunshot fires off into darkness. Another, a third, a fourth, a fifth. They explode and echo and split hot night air.

A woman screams. There’ the sound of panicked foot-traffic, of a struggle, of shouting and breaking bottles. She screams again. It is frantic, distressing; too close and too real.

A car alarm shatters the clamour; its shrill oscillations soar and swirl through the terrified human noise.

David Madson’ Dictaphone is shaking. He’ holding it as tight as he can – hands and fingers clamped – but it’s still trembling, wavering, brushing against the windowsill, which he is crouched beneath in his front room. It is President’s Day, February 2005, on the corner of East 28th and 11th Avenue in East Oakland, and it is all right there on the track; like a frightened memory, a nightmarish recollection, a harrowing evidentiary document.

The woman is sobbing now. A car tears off into the shattered night. A melody rises – clear, resonant and stark. Keyboards fade in, their simple minor-key phrases pealing and shimmering against the blood-washed remnants of the street-scene below. Drums tumble onto the track, as do guitars and vocals, mounting in layer and texture. Mike Patton’ distinctive voice can be heard amongst the din. It is like a beautiful, tragic funeral march.

’11th Ave Freakout’s – the epic, three-part oeuvre that spans both 2005′ Burner and this year’ Level Live Wires – speaks volumes about Madson’ musical orientation and approach. Built around a crude Dictaphone recording of a gang shooting outside his former East Oakland apartment, Freakout embodies a documentarian spirit as much as it does an expressive one. It also exemplifies why Madson’ opaque, drone-heavy hip-hop ambience and smog-stained aural collage should be considered from farther afield than mere musical craft.

“I’m not just trying to make a cool record,” says Madson, speaking over the phone from the more placid environs of his current home in West Berkeley. “A photograph is exactly what it is. The things on Burner and Level Live Wires are things that I can’ force. I can’ like conjure that stuff up. It’s like hopefully I’m there at that moment, you know.”

Best known as one third of the legendary, but now-defunct cLOUDDEAD (along with MCs Doseone and Why?) and as a key player in perhaps the most iconoclastic hip-hop crew of the last decade – the San Francisco Bay Area’ Anticon collective – Madson has collaborated with and remixed some of the most celebrated artists in progressive music (he was the first ever producer to be invited to remix the legendary Boards of Canada). But the 31-year-old Cincinnati-raised producer, isn’ about to stake a claim.

Indeed, for him, music is very much about coincidence, and not just in relation to field-recordings. “It’s the same when you’re coming up with a sample,” he says. “It’s like I’ll go to a thrift store and every now and then I’ll just find something.”

“A perfect example is the Killtone tracks,” he continues, referring to a shimmering, two-part opus on Level Live Wires. “They’ve got that harp sample that everyone seems to grab onto and notice, but that was just a classic example of chance, you know. I went to a thrift store, like I always do, and found this record from the ’70s that was just all harp music. It was a private press record, put out here in Berkeley – who knows how rare it is, it’s not really what I think about – but when I saw the record, I knew straight away that it was going to have something special on it. So I just ran home with this record and put the needle down and heard these beautiful harps, and it was just a total accident man.”

Adding to the inadvertent nature of the recording was the fact that in the process of sampling the record, his equipment glitched. “My SP actually kind of malfunctioned and I just came up with this weird loop that didn’ actually make sense to me, but just blew me away immediately. That was what became the Killtone.”

Madson is a rarity in the context of an international music community increasingly obsessed with computer-aided production precision. For him, the key to his craft is allowing the material and the equipment to define its own direction. Indeed, according to Mason, a musician should simply leave themselves open to the potentialities. “I find that as long as I don’ try and think about it too much and just go with it, that’s when it all happens,” he says.

“I know a lot of people who make music, but I know very few people who seem to just let things happen naturally. They’re always too premeditated, like, “We’re going for this’ or “We’re going for that’. I don’ know man, I’m definitely not afraid of showing my ass. Like, if stuff is sloppy or maybe the bass isn’ hitting as hard or something… You know, my own stuff, it doesn’ hit as hard in clubs, the bass is muddy, maybe there’ too much mid-range harshness here, you know, but that’s just the way it comes out. That’s what the equipment and moment allows for, and I try not to think about it too much.”

His visual art – which litters each of his album sleeves – comes from a similar place. “I still draw a lot today,” he says. “I just sit there and fill a page with just everything – it gets kind of out of hand; I’m kind of compulsive. But yeah, for me I see it as kind of the same as my music because I use ink – these basic ballpoint pens – so every mark counts and every mark is there for everyone to witness. There are some things that I won’ like at all, but it’s like “How can I get around this?’ because this line or this mark is always going to be there…I kind of take the same approach with my music.”

Growing up in Cincinnati, Ohio, Madson’ creative explorations began in visual realm. It wasn’ until his mid-teens – buoyed by his discovery of Prince Paul and Maseo’ crazily layered, psyche-collage on De La Soul’ 3 Feet High and Rising – that he started experimenting with music making in any meaningful way. With only a Sega Genesis in hand, he began to make his own noise-heavy loops and mash-ups, and by the time he had enrolled at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, he had already accumulated piles and piles of cassette tapes filled with muddy, scratchy, static-riddled collage.

He wasn’ alone, coming across two kindred spirits in Adam Drucker (Doseone) and Yoni Wolf (Why?). Within months, they were laying down what would become the now legendary self-titled cLOUDDEAD debut.

Released through Mush in 2001, it paired Madson’ dense sound-worlds with Drucker’ hyper-intellectual ramblings and Wolf’ odd, asymmetrical wordplay, and immediately gained them the attention of the international underground. The trio soon upped stumps and headed for the San Francisco Bay Area, where they joined a fellow expatriate Midwesterner Jeffery Logan (aka Jel) and helped found Anticon.

While cLOUDDEAD continued to garner acclaim – recording a BBC Peel Session in late-2001 and releasing numerous singles – and the Anticon label gained increasing publicity, Madson quietly set about releasing his own series of records. His official debut album, 2001′ Plan 9: Meat Your Hypnotist, utilised the most skeletal of set-ups (a Dr Sample, a cassette deck and a Tascam 8-track to be precise) to weave a 55-track tapestry rough-edged ambience, tape-hiss, record noise and rumbling beats. Second LP No More Wig for Ohio followed in 2003 amongst several side-projects and EPs. But by the time cLOUDDEAD released their second and final album Ten in 2004, things had a taken a turn for Madson.

While he was more prolific than ever creatively, Madson’ living arrangements in East Oakland were beginning to take their toll. By the time the sinister street-scenes, Dictaphone-recorded shootings and sludge-droned atmospheres of 2005′ Burner, it was obvious he was going through some challenging times.

“I was living in this kind of fucked-up part of Oakland,” he sighs. “I was there for maybe like three years, maybe even almost four. It was too long, man. I was there way too long… There’ that picture of a car exploding on the back cover of the new record. Yeah, well, that was taken from the front window of my old house in Oakland – a car freaking blowing up – and that’s just typical shit of that area.”

“I was in this really screwed-up relationship with this girl, and there was a lot of manipulation and mind-games going on. So I guess Burner was what kind of came out of that; there was a lot of chaos in my life and I was just trying to figure things out. That’s why on that record there’ a lot of gunshots and a lot of sort of nasty sounds and distortion and stuff, that may not actually be very pleasing to the ear.”

In this sense, environment plays a huge role in Madson’ work. “Your environment, the people you surround yourself with, it just affects every thing,” he says. “The stuff I make is very personal and is very much a reflection of where I’m at in my head at the time.”

And this couldn’ be more obvious in the differences between Burner and Level Live Wires. While Burner echoed with menacing abrasiveness and brooding, densely claustrophobic atmospheres, Level Live Wires record glows with a wondrous sense of space, beauty and hope.

“With Level Live Wires, I moved to Berkeley – I’ve been here in Berkeley for almost three years now – and you know,” he says. “I live in a cottage, which is pretty much surrounded by a garden and other people’ backyards, so it’s a completely different environment.”

“You know, I’m not hearing gunshots outside my house anymore,” he offers laughingly. “Now I’m hearing birds chirping and humming birds and just the general sounds of West Berkeley, and it’s nowhere near as crazy as where I was.”

With vocal contributions from Hood’ Chris Adams, TV On The Radio’ Tunde Adebimpe and WHY?’ Yoni Wolf, Level Live Wires lilts between crackling analogue atmosphere, warm drones and glimmering instrumental melody, with cuts like the aforementioned ‘Killtone’, My Bloody Valentine-esque ‘Fat Hooks’ and dubbed-up psychedelia ‘Up in Flames’ dance atop the darker textures of ‘Freakout 3’ and ‘Burner’. Despite the records thematic undulations, it feels more stylistically thorough and consistent than pervious efforts, his signature bed of sonic artefacts strewn throughout.

As ever, his beloved SP-1200 sampler played a prominent role in the final process-exposing aesthetic. “It just has such a unique personality or something,” he offers. “It’s glitchy and it’s weird and it’s moody and all these things, and it has its own life or something.”

“It was especially important on Level Live Wires, because I’ll find a sound on a record – and it’ll just be some tiny little thing, like a tone or something that I’ll really be into – and I’ll sample it with my SP-1200, run it through my equipment, compress it heavily, EQ it a lot, and really bring out. You know there might be just some little nuance in the sound that I’m really attracted to, so I’ll really try to dig it out.”

“In the process of doing that, especially because of the SP’ low bit rate, I’ll end up bringing out all the other kind of crap around it. You know, I’ll end up with this mess of 50 different sounds. I didn’ really notice how saturated the record was with pops and hiss and stuff until I’d completely finished recording it. I never notice while I’m doing it. Months after I’m done I’ll listen to it back and be like, “Goddam, I can’ believe how noisy and dirty this stuff is.’ I just love it.”

Madson sees it as something of a generational aesthetic, tied to the cassette. “I just love the nature of tape,” he says. “I kind of grew up with that medium and it’s ingrained in me… I’m 31 years old, so I guess I grew up copying tapes of a tapes, and recording music off the radio onto tape, and copying records onto tape, and I just love what happens to properties and qualities of the sound.”

“Like, I used to collect hip-hop tapes, you know, and I have this huge collection. And half of them are just trashed; you put it in and you can’ even hear the music anymore because the tape is so warped, or it’s been eaten too many times. Those are the kind of things that used to really irritate me, but now it’s kind of fascinating, like, just the nature of that medium and what happens over time.

“You know, I kind of feel sorry for kids who are growing up with MP3s.”

But amongst the mistakes, the happenstance, the tape warps and glitches inherent in his work, there is a distinct clarity to Madson’ creative vision. And light or dark, it’s something that he wants to share. “I want to get some chills and I want the stuff to speak to me,” he says. “Usually I don’ understand it, but if I trust my instincts and I trust in what I’m feeling, maybe someone else will feel that too.”

“I’m always trying to be open to those times where something presents itself,” he pauses. “It’s like, hopefully I’m open to capture it, like the shutter of a camera.”

“To take a really good photograph, you have to have that eye, but also it’s a bunch of luck. You have to click that shutter just at that moment.

Level Live Wires is out through Anticon/Stomp.

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