Born deep in the Reader's Digest belt of the middle U.S. - Cincinnati, Ohio- in the bicentennial year of 1976 to a Catalonian belly dancer and a farm-raised Iowan engineer, D. Philip Madson a.k.a. Odd Nosdam is someone for whom nothing ever rolls along predictably. He played trumpet in elementary school band, hoops on Porkopolis side streets, drew, and skated, but when he stole the 3 Feet High and Rising tape from a party in 8th grade, he hardly could have imagined the decade and a half romance that would follow.
A young odd nosdam began meddling with machines in the mid-90's, looping his favorite Nirvana riffs and Black Moon beats on a Sega Genesis and filling tape after tape with noise collages. In his early 20's, while attending the Art Academy of Cincinnati, this passion bloomed into utter fixation when he purchased a Dr. Sample and Tascam cassette 8-track, and soon after met and collaborated with Doseone and Why? on their fabled Greenthink tapes.
Nosdam begins his art-making by imagining and holding in mind a very specific sound, and then scouring dumpsters, thrift stores, swap meets, the free bins outside record stores, and yard sales across the U.S. (and occasionally Europe) in order to make concrete the elusive dimensions of that dreamed-up sound.
With the raw material of long-forgotten duds in hand - "the most worthlessly obscure records I can find in the basements of Walnut, Iowa's many antique shops," as he notes - he then brings an arsenal of samplers (the E-mu Systems SP1200, the Akai MPC 2000, and the good Boss Dr. Sample SP-202) to bear on his far-flung sound sources. As of late, he's taken to blurring sampling and instrumentation - especially favoring the Micro Moog and the drum set - as well as to weaving into his music a wealth of self-made field recordings. His recording process similarly twines the inimitable tape warmth of his cassette 8 track and the minute precision of Pro Tools, and within his menagerie of machines he tries to maintain a certain rapidity of pace and spontaneity.
His influences - Prince Paul, Lee "Scratch" Perry, Hood, and Flying Saucer Attack foremost among them - suffuse his musical sensibility without overpowering it. Nosdam's genuine, minted uniqueness is the sum of his broad aesthetic appetite, his source material, his chamber of machines, and the quirks, eccentricities, and wild turns of emotion probably evident just below the surface of the finished work.
(Biography by Anticon)
Website: http://www.anticon.com
