March 23, 2001

Anti-Pop Consortium: Naples Notting Hill Club

Having found a home on Warp, Anti-Pop Consortium take hip-hop into new realms of abstract beats...

"ESP harder than snare taps / Over bare tracks snapped like bear traps". Eminem this is not. Three hunched figures kick off with something that sounds like Autechre played on stylophones with a knackered beatbox huffing away in the background, before Beans takes the mike and delivers a rap at a velocity approaching that of a re-entering space station.

Stage left, Priest is a bizarre Sesame Street character - seven feet tall and bent over some physics lab gizmo wearing a sweater that looked like his gran had bought for him. He plonks away on various knobs before leaping into the crowd with "Yo Naples! Whassup?!", and you remember this is a rap gig, after all.

Picking up the tradition of black futurism (blooping Sun Ra synths and Afrika Bambaataa electronic beat science), Anti-Pop Consortium have found a fitting home at westwardly-expanding Warp Records. Their broken beats and lo-fi electronics have more in common with glitchmeisters like Richard Devine and Mira Calix than with any ghetto fabulizers.

Being rooted in the NYC poetry slam scene however gives them an edge over their labelmates' occasional aridity. De La Soul's playfulness comes to mind as Priest gets into an acappella rap about (apparently) being turned into a frog on Mount Kilimanjaro, spurred on by the whooping, hand-gesturing, large-trousered crowd. Unlike many rap gigs which consist of a bloke in a woolly hat shouting at you, here you get Beans' frankly incomprehensible speed rhymes becoming their own beats, the words bumping into and tripping over each other as they reach critical mass until Sayyid knocks back into action with some stonking chunky beats which actually give relief from the words.

It's not "anti-pop" so much as a vision of what pop could sound like. Nope, Eminem this sure ain't, and thank the Lord for that.

Chris Rose