Billboard

Before you meet SJ Esau, you're going to have to forget a few things that you haven't yet learned. For instance, that at the tender age of 10, he was halfway through a four-year rap career in the burgeoning late-'80s Bristol scene. You'll need to wipe from your memory the image of young Samuel Wisternoff (as he's known to his mother) with microphone in hand, freestyling with 3D from Massive Attack at a local party. Forget that it was Tricky who turned the scrappy little lad onto the great adventures of Slick Rick. And that under the guise of TFP, Sam (still 10 years old) and his older brother were signed to Smith & Mighty's prestigious Three Stripe Records. Most importantly, put it out of your mind that before retiring from the rap game at 12, Sam battled his way to second place in the cutthroat DMC rap championships.

Though Sam still has the tape that started it all--a hip-hop mix his father made for him, culled and compiled from the John Peel show--his pre-pubescent life might as well have been some one else's entirely. SJ Esau, as you'll now know him, is a master manipulator of organic sounds, a singer with a sense of humor and an ear for the beautifully bizarre, and a maker of expansive and explosive ventures into the unexplored musical back alleys of Great Britain. His corner of Bristol is a rarified junction where bedroom rambles and aural collage meet inspired collaboration and true song. It's more Pavement and Low than De La Soul, though his love for all three is no doubt equal.

While his brother Jody went off to pursue dreams of becoming a world-renowned deep house DJ/producer (which he's realized as half of Way Out West), SJ Esau was busy carving out the most unique of existences for himself. Through a number of band incarnations (see the Sonic Youth and Pixies-inspired outfit, the Pudding), solo explorations (from raw acoustics to layered noise works), and ongoing collaborative projects (the harsh and loop-driven Onanist Homework Robot and the Guano Ignoramus; as well as the prettily apocalyptic Jeremy Smoking Jacket with singer Rose Kemp), SJ has developed his own carefully constructed brand of chaos which neither repeats itself nor spins wild beyond the realm of comprehension.

With three and a half SJ Esau LPs to his name and a compilation of reworked originals featuring Anticon's own songbird Why? (2005's Stop Touching My Cat), SJ Esau brings his impressive body of work and his patent "fucky" perspective to his favorite label. And while his music has transformed (and continues to) in striking ways, some things never change: Sam Wisternoff still lives in Bristol, and is surrounded by a currently under-publicized community of hard-working artists poised to start a revolution in sound. He has two cats (who occasionally provide backing vocals), admires the works of Kurt Vonnegut, and is usually confused, which seems to work out just fine for the rest of us.

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Discography - see all 5

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  Wrong Faced Cat Feed Collapse

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  Four Point Tool Eater / Private Life Of A Cat (Splt EP with Twocsinak)

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  Live In Doors

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  Photocopy of my face cellotaped to Adrian's Face

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  Queezy Epiphany Coming Through The Wall