A Subtle Guide to Hip-Hop

"Being in Subtle has been an overly Christian metaphor," Dada-hop maestro and meta-MC laureate Adam Drucker (AKA DoseOne) is smiling over the quest for his personal land of milk and honey, as well as its current culmination in his post-everything big band, Subtle. "I've been a little sacrificial lamb...but I don’t know the whole story. I’ve not read that book. What is it called? Harry Potter? The Bible?”

"This is a world of success and success is a game of compromise," says Drucker. "There isn't a lot of cold winning unless you're a sprinter or a boxer...or a lottery player. Everything else is really about compromising and because we don't do that, it's made our adventure very tactile. It's been an escalator where stairs would be."

Not only contending with the tribulations and challenges of playing in a band which creates what genuinely feels like unchartered territory – some kind of ethereal new rock that draws upon hip-hop’s wordiness and posturing, an amalgamation of soothing glitch electronica and Pink Floyd epicry, experimental music’s genre smashing and ultra-theatricism - Subtle have also had to face some overwhelming hurdles.

In a tour bus crash in 2005, Dax Pierson, the shadow mastermind behind the group, was paralysed from the neck down and then, in Barcelona, their tour bus was broken into and their then new album stolen, sending the band slithering down a snake back to square one. "Touring has kind of become an Indiana Jones movie for us," reflects Drucker. "But we're lucky, we give it all and we get extra giving back. It's made us what we are, we're trump tight now and we're definitely a family. Whether we're making a record or not, the closeness between us is tantamount to everything which comes out in the record and what's behind it."

Formed from the foundations of Themselves, Dose's ultra-forward thinking hip-hop relationship with producer Jel, Subtle expands upon the ideas first raised by that group, but does so in a full band context with cello, bass, drums, guitars, keyboards, samples, woodwinds and of course, DoseOne's distinctively nasal hyper-speed vocals. On the whole, they’ve created a stunning body of music; thought provoking and groovy, dense and soothing. But in a certain sense, Subtle are still very much a hip-hop band, however far removed they are from the knuckle dragging swagger.

I suggest to Drucker that hip-hop is not necessarily an intrinsic sound, but rather a way of putting sounds together. "Describing hip-hop in a way that suits what I've always thought and felt that I was completely under the umbrella of to another person and getting them to agree with it is almost impossible,” he answers. "It's a completely sampled art form; every loose, weak or tight simile is a lifting from pop-culture, every metaphor is a lifting from pop culture or a reference and then all the samples and sound sources are lifted and boosted and I think it's supposed to teach you how to steal well, and creatively. You're supposed to take what you like, do it right and be respectful. It's a very respectful thing. You're supposed to be able to meet the people you sample and be like 'Dude, you are the sounds that I make music out of'. You're not supposed to be that running about hiding from George Clinton thing that rap became."

But in reality, hip-hop rarely shows such open cleanliness, and DoseOne's previous projects have fiercely divided hip-hop fans, although battling a fledgling Eminem did little to boost Dose's street cred. With Themselves’ second effort and resultant remix album, the rapper-producer medium seemed to have been pushed as far as it could go, but something changed once Subtle was born. "Everyone had a rebirth in Subtle at one point or another," Drucker muses, before suggesting that the band’s recorded output since has eased out quite naturally.

"We all collect tons of music, all sorts of it and feel like there's more we could add to it, there's a missing section in the bookshelf where our contribution would sit," he offers, with barely a trace of ego. "Your music is not only plugging a hole in the universe inside you but also filling that hole in the record collection that you see missing. You make your contribution like it's irreplaceable.”