Ant

“There was always this weird dream in my head that I could get somewhere,” says Anthony Davis, better known as the legendary hip-hop producer Ant. As one half of Atmosphere, the longtime Minneapolis resident has carved out the type of career that aspiring musicians across the world 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.

The son of a military family, Ant grew up bouncing between locales: Texas, California, New York, Colorado, even as far away as Germany. While moving every couple of years presented plenty of challenges, 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.”

Soon, 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 writ 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.

“If you look at your life—if you really think about it—every seven to ten years, there’s a switch,” Ant says. For him, this meant allowing his process to evolve, bringing new sounds and textures to the foreground. In the decade and a half since Lemons vaulted Atmosphere to the top five on the Billboard 200, Ant has synthesized the philosophies from the two halves of his career, treating original compositions as raw clay to mold while breathing new, unexpected forms of life into samples unearthed from beneath mountains upon mountains of dust.

None of this would have been possible without a staggering work ethic. “I make music almost every day if I’m not on tour,” Ant says, “and I’ve done that most of my adult life—probably starting at 15.” The consequence of that is a Vegas casino-sized vault of unreleased material. Collection of Sounds takes cross sections of this catalog with surgical precision, organizing songs by sound rather than mere chronology. Volume 1 is at times so intimate as to border on claustrophobia: see the creeping “Bar One,” or the way “I Was Always a Collector” twinkles like a haunted music box. But it also has tracks expansive enough to fill entire venues—look no further than the airy, Halloweenish “4-Track Beyond Beat 1996.”

As that latter song’s title suggests, many of the beats on Collection of Sounds: Volume 1 have pockets that are practically begging for rappers to explore. When he first pondered releasing an instrumental series, Ant figured he might want to make the songs more “intricate” than the ones he gave to his rapper collaborators, filling up the space in the mix that would normally be given over to their vocals. “But then it would be jazz, right?” he says with a loud laugh. “And I’m not that.” Fitting, as Collection of Sounds is not about forgetting who you are—it’s about remembering, reconfiguring, and reimagining, all at once.