Priest nonchalantly took the stage, produced a laptop and small sound module from
his backpack, put them on the folding table with the other gear, plugged in and
started playing bleeps and bloops on the little keyboard. Beans and Sayyid joined
him a few minutes later. Beans is the most visually striking: red mohawk under a
camo hat, camo shirt with deer head logo and dark shades. They jammed awhile with
the gear. They were about to kick into a song when a wicked feedback seared through
the speakers and they stopped everything. Sayyid immediately grabbed the mic,
discovered it was dead, and said "yo, forget the mic" and started rapping to us
without mic or music (meanwhile, Priest fixing the problem). Sayyid finished his
very impressive, smooth and incredibly fast rap, and said "ya'll alright?" and got
a resounding yes from all of us. I could have left happy right then. Sayyid saves
the day! He was the lead man all night, always keeping the crowd in it and never
letting the ball drop.
Save for a mis-start on one song, the rest of the set was technically sound. Most
of it was from the new album "Arrhythmia": 'Dead In Motion', 'Ping Pong', 'Mega',
'Silver Heat' and 'Ghostlawns' plus 'Sugar Worm' from the Japanese album "Shopping
Carts Crashing" and a couple new ones. They balanced it out well: some songs were
all laptop with the three of them MCing, others they played everything, or
combinations of the two. They're just as much electronic musicians as they are MC
trio. One song they all switched gear, but most of the time it was Sayyid on drum
machine (he's especially good at playing it live, which is rather daring), Priest
on laptop, mixer and the mini keyboard for bass lines, and Beans on an old analog
keyboard mostly doing R2-D2 talk. All three take turns on the mic or all together
with an impeccable sense of timing. Each is equally capable but with a unique
voice: Sayyid is the really smooth, fast, poetic one, very expressive with his
eyes, face and hands; Beans is the more physical one, almost shouting the lyrics
he's spitting them out so hard, and Priest is the laid back, deepest voice one,
standing prone most of the time with towel around his neck. All of them were quite
capable of the mile-a-minute stuff and proved it. Beans' performance on 'Silver
Heat' was the highlight though. He took center stage and did this amazing upper
torso only twisty dance while violently snapping his head all around but still
somehow managing to keep the mic to his mouth. They played an hour total and I
left even more impressed with APC than I was before I showed up. The tour
continues throughout North America through mid-May. -
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