CityLife

Futuresonic: Anti-Pop Consortium: Experimental Hip Hop + DJ Woody + Peter Parker + Surreal Knowldge

ONE of the biggest quandaries facing bands or artists who have been heralded as vanguards for a new approach to music is how to push forward when the world and his wife catches them up.

You pour all your intelligence and talent into forging a new way, only for others to pilfer from your skill set.

Do you use the initiative to make more leaps forward or do you merely hone what you've done so far and risk becoming staid and passe?

Well Anti-Pop Consortium's answer to this age-old question seemed to be to quit while they were ahead.

After splitting up in 2002 when at their creative peak following the white-hot, visionary, leftfield hip-hop masterwork (and I don't use that word lightly), Arrhythmia, many others have taken up the baton and APC's influence is now heard in all areas of not just hip-hop, but all music of an electronic bent.

Just look at the rest of Futuresonic's formidable line-up: producers like Daedelus, Zomby, Onra, Hudson Mohawke and even Murcof all owe APC a little something.

Anti-Pop Consortium broke through a glass ceiling of sorts for underground hip-hop by supporting Radiohead on tour, bringing cerebral, yet vital beats and rhymes to a predominantly white indie-rock audience, allowing those that followed to break out of one of the hardest genre ghettos to transcend.

So when they decided to give it another go last year - it's noteworthy that it should happen in a year which saw the release of one of the strangest commercial hip-hop records in living memory; Kanye's 808s and Heartbreak - you would like to think that Earl Blaize, Beans, Priest and Sayyid wanted to show these young pups how it's really done.

With no new released material to show for their reunion as yet, this is the first chance us Mancunians had to see how they were going to rip up the blueprint all over again.

Returning pastmasters

Coming onstage 45 minutes later than billed wasn't exactly a great move as the supporting DJs, technically-skilled individuals to a man though they were, failed to generate the amount of anticipation you would like for the returning pastmasters.

The wait itself would have been forgiven had APC hit the ground running, but 10 minutes of tuneless, level-testing laptop noodling wasn't the start the crowd deserved or needed.

Things got slightly better once they decided to air some tunes, mostly new ones, which sounded like, well, Anti-Pop Consortium circa 2002.

The news that the band had clearly spent the last seven years in stasis went down like a lead balloon though and the impatient crowd never really go back onside.

A sprightly 'Dead In Motion' rouses the throng a little but the all-too-frequent lapses into interminable jamming (what is this? The hip-hop Grateful Dead?!) deflate any goodwill they occasionally generate.

There are still sparks of the old creativity and Sayyid's as likeable and Beans as magnetic as they once were, but there's an overriding feeling of self-indulgence.

There are scattered pouches of the crowd who are clearly loving these new creations, nodding and awkwardly bopping with appreciation from time-to-time, but the majority are tired and antsy come the 1am mark (the curfew was supposed to have passed half an hour previous) and people start flooding out.

People have jobs to go to, they can't be waiting around waiting for something, anything to justify the fact they've missed their last buses for this.

Anyway, I guess APC have answered the question I posed in the opening of this review by this time.

What once was thrilling and new soon becomes old and stale.

One of the criticisms thrown at this group the first time around, that they were too dry and academic to really be considered great, has been proved right in an hour-long comeback gig.

Futuristic they once were, now they're just dinosaurs.

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