Adam Drucker, better known by the alias Doseone, has said his initial attraction to rap was as much about the “persona/ego projection” as a love of words. Drucker cut his teeth on the rap-battle circuit, exchanging rhymes with Eminem and other MCs, until his friendships with like-minded musicians led to the creation of the Anticon collective/record label, which fuses hip-hop to indie rock, ambient music, poetry, and experimental noise.Although Drucker has recorded several solo albums, his primary efforts have been collaborative. With the trio cLOUDDEAD, he worked with Yoni Wolf (Why?) and producer David Madson (Odd Nosdam) to create a pair of critically acclaimed albums that pasted non-sequitur raps onto sleepwalking funk beats and archaic keyboards. His most consistent collaboration has been with producer Jel (Jeffrey Logan) as Themselves. The duo has joined forces with German indie-rockers the Notwist as 13 & God and with other musicians in their current project, Subtle.

The six musicians in Subtle tackle Autoharp, electric cello, flute, a bevy of samplers, and both live and mechanized drums. They are known for their theatrical live shows that include plastic forks, winged hourglasses, cardboard Roman column facades, painted skulls, and red velvet outfits. Each of the group’s albums (A New White, Wishingbone, For Hero: For Fool, Yell & Ice, and, most recently, ExitingARM) has continued the story of Hour Hero Yes, a struggling rapper with a black-and-white zebra-striped face who, by turns, becomes stranded on a desert island, discovers he has the rarest blood type in the world, and is abducted to an underground bunker beneath the Hollywood sign, where he is brainwashed to write pop songs.

Drucker ignores not only the boundaries between genres but between mediums as well. He has published a book of poetry, painted portraits of his fans to raise money after Subtle was robbed on tour, created a board game, and made several episodes of a wildly inappropriate satire of the Garfield and Friends TV series. True to his prolific reputation, when I spoke with Drucker at his Oakland apartment he had just finished an appointment with his accountant to file his tax returns and was painting some enormous poster-size watercolors before meeting up with an animator to develop a potential series for the Cartoon Network, as a voice actor.

—Ben Bush

I. ON THE MOUNTAINTOP
GIVING BIRTH TO FIVE BABIES

THE BELIEVER: So you have all these different groups going. For you, what is the purpose of collaborating?

DOSEONE: I always liked Wu-Tang and how you had to follow each rapper from one record to another on different projects. We were interested in collaboration and not letting any project...