Jel

In 1998, his first collaborations with Doseone (of Subtle / Themselves / 13&God) saw the light of day (Hemispheres). In January of 1999, the debut themselves LP was finished (them), and by Spring of the same year, work would begin on the seminal Deep Puddle Dynamics project. And from that record-which included Jel and Doseone, Sole and Alias of Portland, Maine's Live Poets, and Slug from Atmosphere-the concept of anticon was somewhere born. Today Jel lives in the Oakland Bay Area with the same SP-1200 he purchased as a teen. They left the Midwest together in a concerted effort to defy genre with a collective of like-minded individuals and instruments. His crunchy punched-out beats and swells of low-bit atmospherics have become anticon trademarks, highly sought after by artists around the globe. Jel was one of the first, if not the very first musician to use the a drum machine in live performance like a drum kit with little to no sequencing. Using the pads on the drum machine, Jel plays each snare, bass kick, cymbal and loop with his fingers. And his raps ain't half bad either. To date, Jel's list of collaborators includes Can's Malcolm Mooney, Stephanie Böhm from Ms. John Soda, Mike Patton, Wise Intelligent of Poor Righteous Teachers, Black Thought of the Roots, DJ Krush, Mr. Dibbs, Sage Francis, Atmosphere, and just about the entire anticon roster, naturally. Jel is currently a member of themselves (with Doseone and Dax Pierson), Subtle (a cello-drumssamplers-guitar-keyboards-winds-and-words sextet on Lex Records), and 13+God (themselves and the Notwist). His second solo full-length is entitled Soft Money.

Links
www.anticon.com