“The rose in the garbage pail of rap” – Beans, End Game

Six years after they parted ways to pursue separate projects, Anti-Pop Consortium have reunited and recorded their fourth album, 'Fluorescent Black', for Big Dada Recordings. APC, who took Hip Hop by surprise with their 2000 debut, 'Tragic Epilogue', proceeded to make a name for themselves as one of the genre’s premiere boundary-pushers with 'Shopping Carts Crashing' (2000) and cemented their status as lumaries with 'Arrhythmia' (2002), say they reunite enriched by the time apart. “We're grown men,” says Anti-Pop’s Beans. “So our acceptance of our differences has allowed to bring all the more magic to the table. We're stronger now and the music is better for it.”

'Fluorescent Black' represents the group’s best work yet, a seventeen track masterpiece that moves through moods, concepts, beats and rhymes with the mind-bending ease which has always characterised their output, but expands their work out further in every direction. This is an album where certified APC bangers like 'New Jack Exterminator' and 'Apparently' nestle up to the future-funk of 'Volcano', the android-soul of 'The Solution', sly but heartfelt crooning on 'Born Electric', howling-at-the-moon weirdness on 'Timpani', acid-scorched keyboard shapes on 'C Thru U' and 'Dragunov' and pure space-cathedral magnificence on title track, 'Fluorescent Black'. You could go on and on – it’s a record which reveals new facets on every listen, a rich and deepening listening experience unlike any other record around right now – hip hop or otherwise.

When Anti-Pop Consortium’s Beans, M. Sayyid, Earl Blaize, and High Priest parted ways in 2002 to pursue other projects, they left a gap in Hip Hop no other group was entirely prepared to fill. 2002’s 'Arrhythmia' was proof enough that if any other group of MCs could match the collective’s left-field adventurousness or their lyrical dexterity, none had produced a record that both pushed the envelope with experimentation and made heads nod. Anti-Pop Consortium disbanded shortly after the record was released and nearly seven years later the challenge posed to Hip Hop by 'Arrhythmia' remains largely untouched. Until now, when, re-united, the group have returned to better it.

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