Only the three members of cLOUDDEAD – Yoni Wolf (WHY?), Odd Nosdam and Dose One – can speak to the group’s origins, but in the context of underground hip-hop towards the end of the 20th century, their arrival makes perfect sense. Cincinnati had a vital scene; home to Scribble Jam, an annual confluence of MCs, DJs, B-boys and graffiti artists. While the trio soon relocated to the Bay Area where they co-founded the Anticon collective, their Midwestern roots – in ramshackle basements of off-campus hovels, as the cerberus of Southern Ohio – would remain the atomic heart of their early recordings.

[m74667], their debut album (compiling six 10 EPs that appeared between 2000-2001), is aurally dense and obscured. A sprawling mass of miniature beat-suites and Dadaist lyrics, this strange and beautiful 3xLP would influence a myriad of sub-genres (cloud rap, hauntology, lo-fi hip-hop, etc.) in the two decades since its initial release.

As Chris Martins writes in the liner notes, The only reason we know their names today is because of how loudly and curiously they aired their insularity. They rewrote the entire world as they knew it through their own fucked perspective, and when those mysterious 10-inches started popping up in record shops, it wasn’t just a puzzle to investigate: there seemed to be a whole cosmology hidden in those grooves.

cLOUDDEAD disbanded in 2004 after releasing their second and final album, [m83799].