Minneapolis Hip Hop pioneers Atmosphere’s producer Ant drops his new debut solo instrumental album COLLECTION OF SOUNDS: VOL. 1

Anthony Davis, AKA Ant, the producer half of the legendary, pioneering Hip Hop group Atmosphere, has released his debut solo album, ‘Collection of Sounds: Volume 1‘, via Rhymesayers Entertainment, the first of a four-part series of instrumental volumes.

Ant, the son of a military family, grew up bouncing between locales: Texas, California, New York, Colorado, and even as far away as Germany. Moving every couple of years presented plenty of challenges, but it also exposed Ant to a wide array of different people and cultures. It also helped nurture his burgeoning love of music. Ant’s father, only 20 years his senior, was an avid record collector.

“He was into funk and Jazz and Soul music and stuff,” Ant says. “When I’m ten years old, he’s only 30, and rap is out: he was listening to it, but he didn’t know the difference between Grandmaster Flash and Rick James. To him it was the same thing—this is all funk, this is all disco, this is just all music”.

“There was always this weird dream in my head that I could get somewhere,” says Davis.

As one half of Atmosphere, the longtime Minneapolis resident has carved out the type of career that aspiring musicians worldwide imagine as they cut their teeth in home studios and on small stages. Yet while decades of sold-out tours and critical acclaim might have been, at one time, an abstract notion to the now 53-year-old, he always had a sense that he could spin his ingenuity behind turntables into a living. While the last 30 years serve as proof, positive that he was right, his new four-volume collection of instrumental work, Collection of Sounds, illuminates the variety of styles and skills that made that inkling a reality.

Ant was able to forge a reputation, wherever he went, as the kid who had access to songs weeks or months before his peers—or knew about hidden gems that might otherwise never hit whichever new high school he’d parachute into. Music became a sort of skeleton key to the world.

In 1990, he moved to Minneapolis and entered the production world in which he would soon be a pillar. Creative partnerships with rappers named Beyond (later Musab) and Slug led to the formation of Atmosphere, which would go on to become one of the defining acts in not only underground Hip Hop, but independent music at large. In 1995, that trio joined with Brent ‘Siddiq’ Sayers to found Rhymesayers Entertainment, a signature imprint that would go on to issue albums by Aesop Rock, MF DOOM, Eyedea & Abilities, and Brother Ali, alongside countless other acts.

After settling on a lineup of Slug and Ant, Atmosphere became the backbone of Rhymesayers; with records like Lucy Ford (2001), God Loves Ugly (2002), and Seven’s Travels (2003), they established an inimitable style staked on sly, confessional raps and beats that were formally unimpeachable even as they threatened to wobble off any recognizable axis. But when the pair convened to begin work on ‘When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold’ (2008), Ant challenged himself to step outside the familiar and imbue his production with new elements, chiefly live musicians.

Ant – Collection of Sounds: Vol. 1 via iTunes/Spotify

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