13 & God

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More About

• The Notwist
• Sam Prekop
• The Sea & Cake

Doseone is no stranger to collating his muted, twisted emceeing with post-rock abstraction. Besides sharing guest-larynx duties with Sam Prekop of The Sea and Cake on Prefuse 73's Vocal Studies and Uprock Narratives, he participated in a transatlantic collaboration in 2001 that resulted in Hood's ambient-glitch masterpiece, Cold House. Last year, Doseone's crew Themselves completed another globe-spanning mash-up, this time with Germany's lauded experimental ensemble the Notwist. Dubbed 13 & God, it's not only an uncontested success, but it's the best thing Doseone has committed to disc since cLOUDDEAD's watershed debut. The Notwist installs stratum upon stratum of filmy loops, strings and organic drumming beneath Themselves' spooky keys and fractured, harmonized flow, touching on topics like eugenics in "Superman on Ice" ("This song is about sperm/And the mining of human concern") and meta-literacy in "Ghostwork" ("This evening you want to say something that words cannot"). "Walk," the album's static-collage closer, is as tedious as it is predictable, but overall, 13 & God fuses synergy, energy and tension into a work that transcends genre as well as expectation.