Toggling between daydream and full-blown hallucination, iLL-Literacy is a music and performance collective that fuses elements of funk, hip-hop, spoken word, and interactive theatre for a sound and live experience that draws as much from the rich artistic and political history of its Oakland hometown as it does from the experimental and imaginative inclinations of its current Brooklyn base. In their recorded debut "iB4the1" members Dahlak, N.i.C, and Drizzletron work everything from the ground up from in-house production, to self-directed music videos, to the development of a new approach to musical interaction that intimately involves the listener throughout the inception, production, and promotion of the final product.

Although 2009 marks iLL-Literacy's first studio release, the group has been touring globally since 2006. With contributing efforts of live digital producer Ada Clock, this year's live production directed by Kamilah Forbes (director of "Def Poetry Jam on Broadway" and internationally-acclaimed play "Scourge") assertively invites the audience not only to participate in the experience, but to shift the process and outcome of each show through an "open-sourced" exchange of sound and motion that the group has dubbed "digit.iLL.Funk."

The first chapter of iB4the1 releases November 2009, with subsequent chapters unveiling in the spring and fall of 2010. (less info)