Anti-Pop Consortium Remix Contest

WFMU and The Free Music Archive are incredibly excited to announce a remix contest featuring Anti-Pop Consortium! NYC's legendary hip-hop innovators are sharing hi-fi stems & a capellas from "Reflections", a cut off their brand new album Fluorescent Black (Big Dada). After five exploratory years apart, Beans, M. Sayyid, High Priest and Earl Blaize have re-joined forces to craft what may be their finest work yet. Now they're making multitracks from "Reflections" available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, and we can't wait to hear what you do with 'em!

You've got until December 20th to get in the running for prize pacakges courtesy of WFMU, the Free Music Archive, Anti-Pop Consortium and Big Dada. The members of Anti-Pop Consortium will pick the winners, and we'll post the remixes on the Free Music Archive for further remixing and deep listening. Materials + details after the jump...

GUIDELINES
1. Download stems & acapellas (pick one format): aiff | flac | mp3s
(all available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license)

2. Re-Mix / Re-Imagine
* You don't need to use all of the original elements, and you're encouraged to add your own
* If you're looking for more pre-cleared audio to incorporate into your remix, ccMixter and FreeSound are great resources, and of course there are thousands of curated, remix-able songs available here on the Free Music Archive (that's a filtered search for remix-ables only). The FMA library is not entirely remix-able, so if you find tracks another way please visit the track page (by clicking on the name of the track you want to use) and double check the terms of the license. For example, if it says "FMA-Limited" or "NoDerivatives", then it is not remix-able. Credit any other audio sources using the Contest Entry Form.

3. Email a 256kbps mp3 and completed Contest Entry Form to apc.remix[at]freemusicarchive.org
* As part of the Contest Rules, remixes will be shared under the same Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license as Anti-Pop Consortrium's source material. That way, your remix can be shared and remixed non-commercially while protecting the copyright on your own creative input, including your commercial rights.

PRIZES
Aside from eternal fame and the bent ear of Anti-Pop Consortium, one Grand Prize winner will receive:

Fluorescent Black 2xLP (pictured), Free Music Archive Sampler CD's Vol. 1 & Vol 2, WFMU's Pulaski Skyway Hoodie*, and WFMU's Locked Groove LP, "Running In Place"* (also available in WFMU's 24-hr Marathon this Tuesday-Wednesday!)

Runners Up will each receive one Fluorescent Black CD, one limited-run Free Music Archive sampler CD, and one APC button

BACKGROUND / ABOUT ANTI-POP CONSORTIUM
Anti-Pop Consortium is one of the most groundbreaking hip-hop groups of the past dozen years. Beans, High Priest, M. Sayyid and producer Earl Blaize met through poetry slams in New York City in the late 1990s, and the consortium was born out of a series of collaborative cassette releases on the collective's Anti-Pop Recordings imprint. The group went on to release music on Dan the Automator's experimental hip-hop label 75 Ark, and signed to Warp Records for 2002's Arrhythmia. After a five-year hiatus to pursue other projects, APC reformed in 2007 to begin work on a new album, and to play shows with the likes of Public Enemy. Fluorescent Black, APC's first proper album in seven years, was released this fall on Big Dada.

"Reflections" is a testament to Anti-Pop Consortium's broad yet refined musical palette. It hints at a spectrum of styles without defining itself under any particular genre. Just the synth track alone would make for an engaging ambient piece (especially if you listen in headphones):

And then at 2:50, the tempo shifts from 89 to 109 bpm and out pops the psych'd out wah guitar, bass, and drums. Atop this mind-blowing -- at times cinematic -- Earl Blaze production, you've got stereophonic vocal tracks from Beans, High Priest and M. Sayyid, three MCs who are as much poets as they are rappers, and even producers on the side -- check out this video of M. Sayyid constructing a beat from scratch on the MPC 2000XL.

For more inspiration, here's a live version of "Reflections" from Anti-Pop's set at All Tomorrow's Parties NY this past September, with an acapella M. Sayyid verse and a few other variations. You can check out four more songs from that set here, including jams from the new album and the incredible "365" originally by Airborn Audio (the side-project of High Priest and M Sayyid).

The idea for this remix contest can actually be traced back to that WFMU remote broadcast up at Kutsher's Resort. I had the opportunity to dig in to the live mix of Anti-Pop's set, and was blown away by the power of each individual element. I realized: I'm probably not the only one who'd love to pick apart the pieces of an Anti-Pop Consortium track, so I mentioned the idea to Beans and High Priest when they stopped by WFMU's Mudd Up with DJ/Rupture. Turns out they'd already been thinking along these lines.

Anti-Pop Consortium was born out of this type of collaboration. The group has since worked with the likes of Matthew Shipp, DJ Vadim, Alec Empire, Bill Laswell, DJ Krush, kid606, MF Doom, TV on the Radio, Four Tet, DJ Spooky...the list goes on and on and now here's your chance to join the Consortium.

Many thanks to Anti-Pop Consortium, Joseph Yoon, and Big Dada for making this possible and letting us all share in the fun.

Comments

the aiff file is corrupted-:(

Posted by: davo | November 16, 2009 at 01:25 PM

it's un-corrupted now, thanks davo

Posted by: Jason | November 16, 2009 at 01:57 PM

you guys should check out this group page for anti-pop consortium on facebook http://www.facebook.com/groups.php#/group.php?gid=44570562091&ref=ts
and their twitter.com/antipopnyc and sayyid has his own fan page here: http://www.facebook.com/sayyidairborn

thanks for the info

Posted by: Justin Farrow | November 17, 2009 at 04:47 PM