Music For The Advancement Of Hip Hop
Beans and Vladislav Delay silently dropped an unreal rap album
“I’m not a people-pleaser”, Beans raps on Zwaard, his first actual full-length album in six years, fully produced by Finnish experimental techno wizard Vladislav Delay.
Listening to Zwaard, I feel transported into an era when Beans’ group Antipop Consortium marked the spearhead of a small community of hip-hop artists pushing for the advancement of the culture.
Tired of the misogyny and the materialism of mainstream rap and bored of its musical shallowness, they shaped an antithesis – long before groups like Armand Hammer reinvigorated an interest in this kind of avant-garde.
I first discovered Beans’ music in the late 1990s, when I got my hands on a DJ mix CD by Berlin-based group Terranova.
Right after the intro, over a raw drum break and humming bassline, three MCs traded sharp verses in shadowboxing-style battle rap. Their names were Apani B. Fly, Beans and Priest. The track was called “Disorientation”.
A few months later, in June 1999, an album credited to the group The Isolationist received the highest rating of six ‘crowns’ – the equivalent of five mics in The Source – in the most important German hip-hop magazine, Juice.
(I would later become its long-time editor, but that’s a story for another day.)
Here, MCs Beans, Priest, and M.Sayyid showcased their playful off-beat flows and heavy wordplay skills over DJ Vadim’s deep, jazzy production.
The three MCs had met at a poetry slam in New York in 1997. Teaming up with producer Earl Blaize, they self-released a handful of cassettes and 12-inches under the group name Antipop Consortium. The B-side of one of those white-label vinyls landed on the Terranova mix.
Antipop Consortium finally released their debut album Tragic Epilogue in 2000 on the small label 75 Ark.
The hip-hop crowd couldn’t decide what to make of their music.
While the popular indie rap of the late 1990s was mostly soulful boom-bap reminiscent of what was then perceived as ‘the golden era of hip-hop’ (roughly 1988–1994), APC were building their beats with cheap synthesizers, vintage drum machines and loads of weird samples, in the tradition of mid-1980s downtown punk-funk.
It wasn’t just the music that set them apart though. Their wordy stream-of-consciousness lyrics constantly switched between b-boy braggadocio, literary references, cheeky inside jokes and social commentary – performed in rapid-fire flows, often deliberately off-beat.
Music journalists struggled with describing the group’s outsider approach to hip-hop, resorting to meaningless tags like ‘abstract’ and ‘progressive’. Other writers used overly academic language, which didn’t prove helpful either.
Let’s just say their style went over many people’s heads. Rap fans with more conservative tastes hated their music with a passion.
Not me though. I fell for this artsy, heady type of hip-hop.
As 75 Ark folded shortly after the release of their debut album, the UK-based Warp label stepped into the picture. Warp were known as the driving force behind the IDM boom and home to artists like Aphex Twin, Autechre and Boards of Canada. But they’d never signed a rap act before.
In 2002, Warp released Anti-Pop Consortium’s second album Arrhythmia. With that record, the quartet extended its reach beyond the core hip-hop audience, speaking to fans of experimental electronic music and other open-minded listeners.
Their earlier works had been characterized by a certain lo-fi minimalism. Arrhythmia sounded more polished and futuristic, while keeping the anti-commercial attitude and rhetoric. To this day, it is the collective’s opus magnum. If you want to start somewhere, start right here.
I remember seeing the “Ghostlawns” video quite frequently on music television, and the record getting rave reviews in the – still-existing – indie music press.
Still, that album arrived at a strange moment in hip-hop history.
After the turn of the millennium, the healthy ‘indie rap scene’ of the 1990s disappeared seemingly overnight, due to several interlocking developments playing their part – among them the rise of digital music and piracy, musical stagnation in the underground, ‘backpackers’ growing up and out of the culture, and the vibe shift after 9/11.
Antipop Consortium already made music for a very select audience, and the reactions towards their style had been strongly divided even in so-called underground circles. There seemed to be little room for futuristic art-hop in weird time signatures.
Tensions within the group arose, and the group disbanded shortly after Arrhythmia, citing creative differences.
(They would get back together in 2009, releasing their third and final album Fluorescent Black on UK indie hip-hop label Big Dada.)
The first MC to branch out solo from the group was Beans, releasing a pair of self-produced solo albums, Tomorrow Right Now (2003) and Shock City Maverick (2004), on Warp, both strong showcases of his b-boy roots and impressive vocal technique.
High Priest and M.Sayyid kept working together as a duo for a while under the name Airborn Audio, recording an album for Ninja Tune in 2004.
Delving more into the production side of things, High Priest rebranded himself to HPrizm in the early 2010s, exploring the wide realm between instrumental hip-hop, jazz and ambient in his recent music.
M.Sayyid moved to Paris and focused on his work as a visual artist. Following his first solo mixtape from 2016, he’s just released the sequel Error Tape 2, frantically flowing – and casually singing – over self-produced beats that span from psychedelic ambience to sci-fi glitch-hop.
The most active of the former Antipop bunch, Beans’ commanding voice and trademark flow made him a welcome feature guest for artists from other genres like free jazz, indie rock, and electronica. Self-identifying as the ‘Ornette Coleman of rap,’ he kept a steady flow of cassettes and digital releases coming, many of which you can find on his Bandcamp page.
Relatively silent since 2021, Beans is now back with a new album, his first full-length in six years, produced by Sasu Ripatti alias Vladislav Delay.
The Finnish musician had his first releases at roughly the same time as Antipop Consortium. Since coming out with hazy dub techno on the Chain Reaction label, he has experimented with many styles of electronic music, from vocal house to harsh noise.
A few years ago, Ripatti gave an interview to Tone Glow about his reclusive life on a remote Finnish island, regularly leaving on long hikes into the sparse landscape above the tree line, not meeting a single human in weeks.
Ripatti’s crisp production for Zwaard focuses on clattering percussion, futuristic synth stabs and hectic juke bass drums. While I enjoy these uptempo tracks, my favourites are the ones where he chooses to pull the brakes – like the dark, menacing “Zwaard 7” and the deep, dreamy “Zwaard 12”.
The music provides a challenging but inspirational backdrop for Beans to lean into his trademark style, even revisiting the table-tennis ball sound that APC used for their early underground hit “Ping Pong” (on “Zwaard 3”).
Lyrically, Beans still jumps from expressions of hip-hop bravado to glimpses into the trials and tribulations of his personal life within the same verse, slipping in bits of sarcastic political commentary. Attacking these difficult instrumentals, most of which other MCs wouldn’t dare touching at all, he displays the stoic serenity of the lone samurai in the 1999 Jim Jarmusch film Ghost Dog.
Zwaard is headphone hip-hop – a perfect companion for city subway rides and long hood walks. It’s my favourite rap album in a while, as it features a rare quality: Despite its very experimental nature, it’s actually fun to listen to.
It will be interesting to see whether there’s an audience for this kind of music in a landscape where artists like Armand Hammer and Danny Brown – now signed to Warp as history repeats itself – are hailed by a new indie rap community. Someone like billy woods obviously represents that lineage.
As far as I can tell, Beans won’t care much. He’s been there, done that, always pushing forward, for the advancement of hip-hop.
Zwaard by Beans is available now at Bandcamp, and streaming on all services.
Listen to the album stand-out cut “Zwaard_Over”, on which Beans reunites with HPrizm, formerly known as High Priest, and M.Sayyid.
© 2024 Stephan Kunze
LOVE APC! I feel it only right to also mention the staggeringly good remix of Ghostlawns by LFO. It still sounds like the future even now and absolutely blasts as a track.
Hola , Excelente Articulo. Un Saludo.