This story is featured in CityBeat's April 17 print edition.
It’s hard to keep up with Atmosphere. Nearly 30 years into an existence that keeps bobbing and weaving, few hip-hop collaborations have been as busy as that of rapper Sean Daley (aka Slug) and DJ/beatmaster/producer Anthony Davis (aka Ant): 12 full-length studio albums, 10 EPs and 13 releases of varying scope under their “Sad Clown/Bad Dub” moniker, which includes remixes, live albums and other odds and ends. The duo sprouted from Minneapolis’ Rhymesayers collective of the late 1990s, over the years evolving a crafty aesthetic that melds samples with live instrumentation and a lyrical approach as introspective as it is dexterous.
Atmosphere’s most recent studio album, 2023’s So Many Other Realities Exist Simultaneously, features 20 songs in just over an hour, an eclectic mix of sonic structures and Slug’s distinctive flow, which delves into topics both mundane and surreal. Album opener “Okay” sets the tone, employing a basic, Motown-esque beat as Slug raps about the fact that, yes, he’s going to be OK despite everything that has transpired in our unsettled present-day world. At age 51, Slug also seems content with his current place on the musical landscape: “Midwest average from the mid-2000s/And being the best was never the intended destination/I just want appreciation for my presentation.”
A big part of that presentation is Atmosphere’s live shows — stimulating endeavors that, unlike most rap tours, make it a point to hit Midwestern cities like Cincinnati.
“Doing my own headline tours, oftentimes you can start to realize that everyone that’s here, they’re here for you,” Slug said in a 2022 interview with Grateful Web. “And so you just gotta do those songs they want to hear, the ones that they hold dear to themselves. But when you’re playing in front of people that don’t know you, they don’t have any songs that they hold dear to themselves, so you have this opportunity to leave a first impression and to possibly convince them to go look into finding some songs that they may hold dear to themselves.”
Atmosphere plays Bogart’s on April 26 at 6:30 p.m. Info: bogarts.com.
