On March 30 of this year, Brandon Whitney, better known to the world as Alias, suddenly and tragically passed away in his sleep. Not only was he a founding member of the anticon. collective, he was also an incredible producer, who along with making some brilliant solo albums, produced for the likes of Astronautalis, B. Dolan, and Sage Francis. His career slowed down in the 2010s when he decided to move back home to Maine with his family, where he worked a couple of jobs and mostly made music in his home studio at night after everyone else had gone to bed. Fortunately, though, before he passed he had recently reconnected with his fellow anticon. member Doseone, who actually was in period of transition himself after being laid off from a corporate gaming job and found himself in Oakland trying to hustle as an indie gamer much the way he had hustled as an emcee earlier in his life. While the two had worked together in their early years as part of projects like Deep Puddle Dynamics, they never recorded together as a duo. As they reconnected at this point in their lives, the original idea was to just knock something out quick and dirty, just for fun. Once they started in on the album, though, it quickly transformed into something much different and incredibly special. The result is an amazing album called Less Is Orchestra.

One of the things that immediately hit me in listening to this album was just what a unique producer Alias was. Because his work was subtler than a lot of his cohort, it was easy to overlook just how great his production was. Listening to Less is Orchestra, you get a great look at what made him so special, as he is able to create these really odd and rich soundscapes that bring in disparate elements like Chopped and Screwed with 8-bit production, gentle downtempo and post-rock up against synth-pop and IDM beats. Alias had this amazing knack for contrast, where his music could sound incredibly calm and soothing at one minute, then extremely chaotic and eerie the next. It could be funky and danceable, but the minute you start to get into the groove, the beat could drop out or he could push the tempo. Most importantly, though, he knew how to put all of this in conversation with each other, so that while you might be taken by surprise by all the twists and turns he takes during the album, by the time you get to the end, you’ll be thinking, “Oh, I get it. Wow.” On the other side of the coin, you also have one of the most unique emcees to ever pick up a mic in Doseone. There are very few emcees that I can point to and say, “no one else raps like that,” but I can say that with great confidence about Doseone. It’s been a few years since we got a proper solo emcee album from him, so as much as I was enjoying Alias’s production, it was also very exciting to get reacquainted with Doseone on the mic. Over the course of the album, Doseone spins the tale of a 9 to 5 corporate drone who slowly devolves into his more base and animal self, and he does this in the way that only Doseone can. That means that he will weave from a direct narrative that you can cling on to and understand easily to a much more abstract poetry that’s meant to get more at the essence of the emotion of the tale, and to posit philosophical questions about our purpose on this planet. The entire time he’s doing this, he’s doing so with a delivery that is all over the map in a way that somehow works for Doseone, but seems like it shouldn’t. He starts with a nasal speaking voice that is slightly higher that you might initially expect, but years ago, he learned how to take that already unique speaking voice and then transform it into an even more unique voice in hip hop. One of the ways in which he does that is by jumping into different pockets of the register of his voice. He’ll push it to the highest end of his delivery where it can sound urgent or playful, or he drop down into his lowest register where he’s developed this really menacing growl. This becomes an effective tool over the course of these ten tracks in conveying the story of this character who is devolving under the pressures of life expectations into something more primal, all the way up until the final track, “The Kraken.” This all comes together to give you a listening experience that you would be hard pressed to find anywhere else.

When Alias, Doseone, and the rest of anticon. hit the scene in the late ‘90s, their mission was to expand people’s perceptions of what hip hop could sound like. Twenty years later, and Alias and Doseone are still reminding us that there are no rules when it comes to hip hop with Less is Orchestra. As the title implies, there’s only two artists on the album, but they hit you with a cacophony of sounds and rhymes and visions that will keep you on your toes and come at you faster than you realize. Once you make it through the album, it will take a second for your brain to catch up and process everything these two just threw at you for the last forty minutes. Much like everyone else, I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to Alias just yet, but if this is the last album we get from him, I can’t think of a more fitting last chapter for him. This album is incredibly challenging, but it’s so exciting and intriguing at the same time, you can’t help but try to unpack everything Alias and Doseone put into Less Is Orchestra.