Have you ever felt your heart race or skip a beat? Well, if you weren't dropping X or having a heart attack, chances are what you felt was an arrhythmia-- an irregularity in the rhythm of your heartbeat. Like the title suggests, the Anti-Pop Consortium knows a thing or two about irregular beats. Their latest LP,Arrhythmia, is a study in them, as well as just about everything else irregular, save perhaps my recent string of emergency bowel movements.

Anti-Pop Consortium is the charter member of Warp Records' hip-hop club. This should tell you something. In case you haven't been keeping up, Warp has gained worldwide accolades for its roster of IDM trailblazers: Autechre, Boards of Canada, and Aphex Twin, to name only a few. And in case you were wondering, no, APC doesn't sound a hell of a lot like Ludacris. Once someone finally does the hard work of labeling hip-hop's various subgenres, Anti-Pop just might carve out a region known as "free hip-hop," not unlike the free jazz of Sun Ra who the boys cite as a major influence. Their sound is unique, drawing a happy experimental medium somewhere between the ghetto and the laptop (or maybe even the rave), with cerebral lyrics straight from the poetry cafe.

To begin with, APC employs a variety of unusual samples: VH-1 Pop-Up Video bubbles, robotic video game bleeps, jingle bells, midsummer's cricket chirps, finger snaps, and the most inventive, an entire song built around the bounce of a ping pong ball ("Ping Pong [The Return]"). Behind the samples are built-from-scratch drum-n-bass beats-- largely sterile and inorganic, favoring programming over sampling dusty vinyl. The results are progressive, glitchy, angular and off-kilter. Again, not Ludacris.

Anti-Pop are similarly unconventional in their lyrics, albeit more in their content than in how they flow. So you get a whole track about an unfortunate old soul bent on eliminating soap scum ("We Kill Soap Scum"), and another telling a tale of wisely avoiding crack-ho jailbait ("Minna Street"). The lyrics sound calculated, considered, sometimes profound, and always heady. For all who've heard MCs wax philosophical and come off pretentious, you'll be happy to hear that APC goes the same route, without the turgid results.

Highlights include the first proper track, "Bubbles." which tends towards more traditional hip-hop, utilizing a P-Funk-style synth-bass hook over congas and hand claps. "Ghost Lawns" draws from the "B.O.B." school of beats, a seriously uptempo drum-n-bass number with accordingly frenetic rhymes, and the let's-get-ready chants of "tonight, alright" by a chorus of young ladies in between verses.

Pushing hip-hop's creative boundaries has its pitfalls, however. On Arrhythmia, where progressive equals electronic, the beats occasionally come off as a tad thin. Strange to say, but they just lack soul. This is the only real weakness, but it's a significant one; even though every track is good, none push that adjective past a "very" prefix. Perhaps rumpshaking is too much to ask for, but one might like something nasty, or funky, or fierce. Yet despite its shortcomings, Arrhythmia has plenty of appeal, particularly to the indie crowd, for whom progressivism is a badge of pride. And after all, it is the Consortium's best release yet. Just don't expect to see these three on the cover of Source anytime soon.

-Brad Haywood, May 3rd, 2002