Why? IMAGE: JESSICA MILLER

"Why? Exactly, man."

Twenty-five-year-old Yoni Wolf, who moonlights as indie-hop trickster Why?, is answering a question about the reason for his recent shift to a more poppy sound. With his answer, he sets up the pattern for the rest of the interview, pairing his smart-ass asides with moments of crystalline truth. "The older and older you get, the softer and softer you sound," Wolf says, "until you're singing in the most gentle falsetto you can."

Sanddollars, the upcoming EP release from Why?, now a quartet playing under Wolf's name, is a patchwork of melody, voice and space, a collage that paints the artist's views of the world with a tangled brush. It's a little Beatles, it's a little saccharine indie-pop and it's a little aggro college rock. But there is one thing it's definitely not-a hip-hop album. That musical move is surprising because Why?, like the other artists who make up Anticon, the Bay Area music collective, is rooted in hip-hop.

"It was all kids who grew up in fairly similar backgrounds from all around the country," says Wolf about labelmates like Doseone, Sole and Gel. "We were into rap but felt like we were excluded from it for being weird. Or for being too outside-of-the-box."

After the decade-long emergence of a hip-hop underground, the label "underground" almost seems unnecessary. Except in the case of artists like Wolf, who don't necessarily work with two turntables and a microphone, the templates of the rap and hip-hop they heard as kids. At least not the way Atmosphere or Lyrics Born or Aesop Rock or any of the other members of the above-ground underground do.

"It was a very different time in the mid- to late '90s," Wolf says. "Hip-hop just started to go mainstream, it was starting to be on MTV and everything. And there was a backlash and an underground thing going on against that stuff. And I think where we come from is a backlash to that whole underground thing."

Wolf grew up in Cincinnati, where he listened to groups like A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul and eventually started selling and trading tapes of his own recordings with people across the country. He recorded those tapes with whatever he could find, including instruments his older brother's bandmates left at his house, a four-track recorder and a Dr. Sampler courtesy of Doseone, one of the early Anticon crewmates and Wolf's partner in the sideproject cLOUDDEAD. His music showed his quirky influences. The albums he released, while inconsistent, proved he was a lyricist with emotional depth. But he was also a musician able to take the foundations of the genre, namely turntablism, repetitive beats and a quick tongue, mix it all up with a folk sensibility, and then mutate the template, reinventing hip-hop for a postmodern crowd.

As a concept, all of this might sound pretentious, but the music is incredibly moving. Why?'s songs are inspired by paranoia, existential curiosity and, as Wolf's snarky comments in interview attest, ridicule. On Sanddollars' first track, "Miss Ohio's Nameless," Wolf takes on the absurdity of the artificial fame granted in the online music community. On "500 Fingernails," he mourns both the passing of time and his own inability to shake his past as a "fat-faced" kid. And then on "Sick 2 Think," he considers the sickness of modernity and his acceptance of it, grappling with the pleasure he receives at seeing his reflection in bus windows and airplane bathrooms.

"I was in the bathroom in the back of an airplane, I was looking at myself, and I thought, 'Damn, I look good,'" says Wolf. "Am I that fucked-up that I look good in this kind of lighting? Am I sick?"

Sure, it's all fairly heavy, but once it was worse. "You should hear the older version," Wolf says. "My voice was pitched down. It sounded so disgusting. Like this guy with his pants unbuttoned eating pizza and on the Internet at 4 in the morning."

Weened from the music that birthed them, Why?'s sonic experimentations have become something completely different, and the artist says that scares him, even while it might make for captivating music.

"I think my intuition is worsening," Wolf says. "But my craft is getting better. And that's not really what I value. I value intuition. But that's what happens. When you are doing something for a long time, you start to lose that spontaneity, that spark, that somehow fueled your early stuff. Because now you know too much."

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Why? plays with Nedelle, Fred Thomas and Hurtbird Friday, April 15, at Berbati's Pan, 10 SW 3rd Ave., 248-4579. 9:30 pm. $8 advance, $10 day of show. 21+.