ANTI-POP CONSORTIUM

Arrhythmia

2LP/CD, Warp

Hip Hop with estrangement-effects? And it works. Where the Neptunes have left off in working weird sounds into cool grooves, the Anti-Pop Consortium picks it up and explores the borderlines of beats that still groove somehow, but you don’t know why, and sounds that make that groove fat and harmonious, but you can’t say how. Listening to “arrhythmia” you’ll find yourself grooving to some weird stuff and like it. After Prefuse 73 the next cool sort of-Hip Hop-record on Warp.

Funny thing, whenever I brush with Hip Hop of any kind, it seems as if it is of the weird, underground kind. Mainstream / Charts Hip-Hop is a burn-straight-to-CD-R-kind of thing to me. Because I don’t care if Dr. Dre makes another million bucks. The man once sued his investment company for not investing his money as good as they should / could and they gave him another 100 million bucks or so on top. Anyway, all this mainstream-hiphop-artists spend their too much money on stupid clothes anyway. No, even though I like the beats from time to time, I won’t get a rap-head, really. The APC is different and you’ll hear that right from the beginning. There is never a straight beat on “arrhythmia” (well, with that title?) and there is no macho-bullshit-rapping and there is no sexy-female-chorus. And wherever there is something that sounds known, it will be re-arranged somehow, for instance the vocoder-effects during the refrain on “Bubblz” together with a very synthetic bassline, a small drumbeats and some bongos and nothing more. And this is the straightest, most street-style track on here.

Interestingly what is straight and what is not will change over time listening to this CD, because after some time all the tracks start to sound straight and you’ll only realise how far you have wandered off, when you listen to some charts-hip hop instead (and with charts hip hop I still mean Busta Rhymes, Eminem or Missy Elliot, and not never ever crap like Bro’Sis or any other synthetic popstar-band.) Just listen to how a track like “Ping Pong” plays with you, whose stereo-effected beats are really the click-clacking of a table-tennis-ball being played. And they manage to do some groovy things over that. Is there place in Hip Hop for realism or stupid jokes like that? Sure there is. And if there isn’t, there should be. There are tires screeching, opera singing, hissing noises, applause, animal noises and even a fake radio DJ arguing with a Pac Man voice about white-noise-static. Overall, and even though I counted off all these “real” sounds, “arrhythmia” is still a very digital record. Everything sounds synthetisized and worked up on computers, of course. This record is still on Warp.

After one third this record starts to hint to some other music. The beat of “silver heat” is really similar to Gonzales’ “so called party over there” and some time later, I swear, I heard the beat from “can’t get you out of my head”, but both of them really change into something different before the time is up to make any legal causes, and then it gets a little weirder, so that the legal consultants of big artists won’t have anything to do with it anymore. I can see that the APC will get as big as the Neptunes, but only if they don’t evolve anymore and wait out another five years, until the world is ready for their way of things. If they keep on working and going forward, they’ll always be ahead of their / our times and so never make it out of underground-status. Which is cool with me, and provides for them that I will buy their records and not burn them down from the internet. Actuall, “arrhythmia” should be listened to both by the hip hop-crowd and the electronica-crowd. But I am afraid it won’t be listened to by both.

www.warprecords.com

06/2002