Antipop Consortium's 'Arrhythmia' Was Warp's Jam for an Uneasy Future

The liner notes to Anti Pop Consortium's 2002 album Arrhythmia claim that the group's second album was engineered and mixed in Brookdale Medical Centre, a volunteer-run teaching hospital in Brownsville, Brooklyn. Opened 90 years ago with the help of public donations, it has changed names multiple times; gone through public strikes, diaspora, the AIDS crisis, setbacks, growth – the past, essentially. And in that hospital, amongst all of that Brooklyn history, in what is mysteriously referred to as the "G Building", something wild was being made. It seems like the oddest place to let an album reach its full potential but then again, APC weren't a cut-and-dried group.

When Arrhythmia was released, New York's underground hip-hop scene (typified by labels like Rawkus Records and Def Jux) was chasing its last hurrah in the early Noughties. It was only a few years into the advent of file-sharing sites, but a few years before the underground/mainstream lines grew blurry with the dawn of the blog era. All music, let alone hip-hop, would soon become a mono-genre, all sound melting down into the one, bubbling pot. But this was still an era where critics and audiences pitted hip-hop against itself, too. CMJ New Music Monthly claimed in its pages that Anti Pop Consortium were "on a mission to kill hip-hop since 1996". SPIN claimed that the group put "brains before bling bling and [keep] libidos incognito". Pitchfork helpfully offered this bon mot: "APC doesn't sound a hell of a lot like Ludacris."

It seems fair to say that the four men that make up APC – rappers Beans, M. Sayiid and High Priest with producer Earl Blaize - were growing tired of these scene politics. It helps you to understand why they would move their music across the Atlantic to become Warp Records' marquee hip-hop act. Following a short UK tour in 1999 in support of early single 'Disorientation' (a track prominently featured on Kevin Martin aka The Bug's Collision Course compilation), the group realised their music stylings were better received away from home. British audiences accepted them with open arms, and well away from the culture wars staged overseas. As Beans would say on reflection in 2009, the British public "tend to see the light first".

Warp founder Steve Beckett signed the group – "a fairly big signing," as ex-Warp employee and Lex Records founder Tom Brown recalls via e-mail. "Everyone was listening to early Def Jux at the time, and I think it seemed like a good fit." As Warp was entering its second decade, it began to branch out from the electronic music on which its reputation was made. Alongside full-lengths from Warp reliables like Aphex Twin, Squarepusher and Boards of Canada, the period of 2001-2002 brought a series of records by diverse artists: psychedelia heads Broadcast, art-house film maven Vincent Gallo, The Day Today creator Chris Morris. APC fit snugly in with the label's progressive bent. "Warp always looked at scenes - post rock, hip-hop, etc - outside electronic music where there were similar values," says Brown.

There are plenty reasons why APC's alliance with Warp makes sense. Arrhythmia acts as Warp's connective tissue between electronic music and hip-hop, an acknowledgement of electronic music's hip-hop influence and vice versa. The group's beats - often combining off-centre rhythms and an austere command of empty space - were distinct in their similarities to the bone-gristle programming of Autechre and the BPM crunching of Aphex Twin.

Even at their most accessible there was a deep electronic lineage in the music, acknowledged early on with Beans' boast of "I move crowds like Larry Levan" over High Priest's beat for 'Bubblz'. Congas and timbales fire back and forth across the neon-disco buzz, and the addition of dense poetry/rap fits in rather than jarring. It's a cross-section of New York's urban nightlife, from disco clubs to cyphers in the park, from Latin Quarter percussion to poetry clubs, all traced through the buzz of electronic music.

Elsewhere, songs leap and judder, even when they have almost-hooks. Grandiose atmospheres are built up – thudding drums, even opera singers - then jettisoned in quick measure. A bass drum will turn into a tabla for a moment, a croon will distort in on itself, a metallic clang will ring off against the beat until you take notice. In an interlude, an alien voice credited only as 'Tron Man' pauses the action to reflect on their being ("my skin is sallow, I need sun"), before plunging into half a minute of music looped backwards. You can almost hear the synapses firing on and off, on and off.

Following Arrhythmia's release, APC toured with Radiohead, another group experimenting with polyrhythmic dance music. By the time they toured the United States with DJ Shadow – yet again, another artist that was narrowing the lines between electronic culture and modern hip-hop – the frays were beginning to show. Six months after Arrhythmia dropped on Warp, the group split (but they have since reformed, releasing 2009's Fluorescent Black on Big Dada).

In the spirit of other important records from Warp, I wondered if an influence had trickled through to modern groups. Listening to APC, there is a spark of joy in realising how idiosyncratic Arrhythmia remains. If you squint, you can hear moments of Warp signee Flying Lotus's free-floating electronic experimentalism here, but Arrhythmia feels different from pretty much everything in Warp's catalogue. There are musical influences, like the electronic artists mentioned above, but these works are turned inside-out and into jams for an uneasy future: polyrhythmic, complicated, ready to fire off in a thousand directions at any one time.

You can follow Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy on Twitter here: @danielmondon

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