The Unseen, released in 2000, was among the new decade’s first sleeper hits, ranking on Spin’s year-end list at a time when the producer and label were unknown outside of hip-hop DJ circles. Few could have known that this, Madlib’s solo debut, would be just the first album in a rich catalog of music spanning from hip-hop to jazz, with wild experimentation and collaborations with MF DOOM & J Dilla. The identity of Quasimoto himself was a bit of a mystery – maybe he was Madlib, maybe he wasn’t. Maybe it’s none of our business. In fact, Madlib created Quasimoto as someone to rap on his beats for his own private listening while living in Oxnard and Santa Barbara in the 1990s. The Unseen was born out of Peanut Butter Wolf’s convincing Madlib to release these recordings for the rest of the us to hear.

street date 6/13/2000