Jel 'Soft Money' album

The head architect of Anticon’s aural acropolis at long last offers up his true album-length debut: Soft Money. Jeffrey “Jel” Logan’s long-awaited magnum opus is sly dog of a disc born of ad-inspired paranoia, well-placed suspicion, and outright obsession where all things sound are concerned. With 2002’s 10 Seconds, Jel imagined a long-playing ode to his first real love—the SP-1200—composed entirely of hand-picked snippets from three decades of hip-hop history. Soft Money takes that same meticulously studied musical consciousness and expands it both literally (the previous LP got its name from the limited sample time of the SP) and conceptually. Though undeniably rooted in the boom-bap of rap’s best instrumentals, this is an ode to good music, period, channeled through one man and his machines, with a little help from some good friends.

Album opener “To Buy a Car” is a classic anticommercialism jam featuring Jel’s own ultrasmooth vintage-styled raps over a tense backbeat of lo-bit drums, breakbeat loops, pulsing bass, cold tones and sampled commercial clips. The head-nodding intensity builds to a fever pitch before dashing itself happily against the gorgeous calm of “All Day Breakfast.” Drones and squeals from stringed instruments from foreign lands arch high over the twinkling keys, heavy bass and nimbly layered rhythms. Track three (“No Solution”) opens with record static and an archaic sample before giving way to the best recorded Rhodes timbre this side of OK Computer (courtesy of Dosh) and a trademark Jel bump. Fog’s Andrew Broder layers the guitar a la Fennesz, while Jel’s distorted voice drops the wisdom: “Shut up and get used to the smell the ruins/Do you think that Rome was burnt in a day?” And we’re only 10 minutes in.

Elsewhere, Jel challenges Broadcast on their own turf with dreamy noir-hopper “All Around” (starring Steffi Bohm of Ms. John Soda as chanteuse). “Sweat Cream in It” is one of the most impressive moments—a live-recorded sampler tour de force—while the presence of Poor Righteous Teachers’ Wise Intelligent on the anti-Bush, anti-bling diatribe “WMD” is a fine coup in and of itself. Jel also weaves in contributions from Parisian synth wizard Hervé Salters (of General Electrics), Anticon poet laureate Pedestrian, and cLOUDDEAD’s Odd Nosdam to complete Soft Money’s ornate amalgam of progressive hip-hop, electronic composition and musique concrète. All in all, it’s a damn fine record, uncluttered but deceptively full and entirely original.

Biography

He was but a young buck, wet behind the ears and not all that wise. But if Jeffery James Logan—Catholic-born Chicago son, one-time Chuck Berry enthusiast, junior high schooler— knew one thing, he knew that he needed to play the drums. If he knew another thing, it was that he wouldn’t get to, no matter how much angsty teen protest or sullen-eyed brooding he put into the cause, because, well, some jock kid was in better with the gym teacher. So Jeff—the SP-1200 beatmachine master we now know as Jel—took up the coronet. Thankfully, the SP found Jel shortly after Christmas one high school year. He’d been helping elderly women pump gas as part of a long-term scheme to turn fuel into money into circuitry into sound. He still had the tapes from the year he fell in love with music—1989 radio broadcasts from 105.9 WGCI, The Rap Down with Franky J and Disco Dave—and had been desperately searching for a way to feed his intense attraction to beat-making ever since his first urges were denied. With cash clenched tightly in young fist, he marched to the nearest music store and happily bought the cornerstone of his entire sound: the SP-1200. Revenge on a gym teacher never felt so sweet. And Jel never looked back.

The next few years were spent mostly in two places. When Jel wasn’t locked away in his room with his new mechanical love, he was helping out behind the scenes at Northwestern University’s radio station. At home he’d cut, chop, record, and tap; on campus he’d pass his tapes along to local DJs and emcees that would stop by the station. Jel’s friend and radio partner Kevin Beacham introduced him to the hip-hop that came before, the secrets of the drum machine (i.e. how to cheat to 10-second sample time), and —most importantly—a certain nasaltoned Cincinnati rapper who went by the name of Doseone. The rest of Jel’s story is the beginning stages and steady fruition of an entire movement in sound. In 1996, he quit art school in favor of the chills. In 1998, his first collaborations with dose saw the light of day (Hemispheres). In January of 1999, the debut themselves LP was finished (them), and by Spring of the same year, work would begin on the seminal Deep Puddle Dynamics project. And from that record—which included Jel and Doseone, Sole and Alias of Portland, Maine’s Live Poets, and Slug from Atmosphere—the concept of anticon was somewhere born.

Today Jel lives in the Oakland Bay Area with the same SP-1200 he purchased as a teen. They left the Midwest together in a concerted effort to defy genre with a collective of like-minded individuals and instruments. His crunchy punched-out beats and swells of low-bit atmospherics have become anticon trademarks, highly sought after by artists around the globe. Jel was one of the first, if not the very first musician to use the a drum machine in live performance like a drum kit with little to no sequencing. Using the pads on the drum machine, Jel plays each snare, bass kick, cymbal and loop with his fingers. And his raps ain’t half bad either. To date, Jel’s list of collaborators includes Can’s Malcolm Mooney, Stephanie Bohm from Ms. John Soda, Mike Patton, Wise Intelligent of Poor Righteous Teachers, Black Thought of the Roots, DJ Krush, Mr. Dibbs, Sage Francis, Atmosphere, and just about the entire anticon roster, naturally. Jel is currently a member of themselves (with Doseone and Dax Pierson), Subtle (a cello-drumssamplers-guitar-keyboards-winds-and-words sextet on Lex Records), and 13+God (themselves and the Notwist). His second solo full-length is entitled Soft Money.

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Jel - Soft Money