Circle

The Anticon record collective is a group comprised of poets and hip-hop artists who pursue styles that are more experimental ways of performing their art. This means that much of the work is either inaccessible to casual hip-hop listeners, or just overly pretentious. Perhaps "pretentious" is a word some might use to describe the collaboration between MC Dose One and DJ Boom Bip, "Circle," but that would mean they haven't given it a good listen. This CD consists of 29 mind-blowing tracks of Dose One reciting his surreal rapid-fire rhymes over Boom Bip's beats, which can range from the catchy and danceable to the ambient and hypnotic. Songs like "Dead Man's Teal" and ". . . No Corners" have beats that one could listen to only as beats, and still find entertaining. By doing this, one can hear how Dose One lyrics, apart from being poetry in and of themselves, have a definite rhythmic value that sounds pleasing even without paying conscious attention to what is said.

One would be extremely hard pressed to determine what is being said. When performed live, some of the lyrics must be recorded and played simultaneously with the performance. Amidst the acid trip of gibberish, one hears interesting meditations on art and religion on tracks like "Questions over Coffee," and other, more puzzling poems, like directions to California from an undisclosed area, the name of the track being, "Directions to California." Dose One has his art down. Having mastered traditional forms of rap, he has taken his spoken word to the next left. Although some of these tracks seem to have no point on the album, they are few and far between, and when he is actually rapping in his signature style, he is burning up the track with ideas. Clearly, he has enough ideas to keep 29 songs interesting, and explorative.