Unforgiving 92 bpm rap forged in concrete basements.
Apex Cipher emerged from a decommissioned subway car where the coffee is always cold and the 808s rattle the floorboards. Operating as a strict duo, they write every verse over a single looping drum break before letting the beat breathe. Their signature sound relies on a heavily modified cassette recorder that captures every breathless punchline with gritty analog warmth.
Kronika
1992
The decommissioned subway car
We dragged the four-track and the crate of lukewarm coffee down the metal stairs into the dark before anyone could stop us. Kevin spent three hours trying to convince the microphone that the dripping water pipe was a deliberate hi-hat accent, while Marcus stared at a dead moth on the console and muttered rhyming couplets about damp concrete. The 808s rattled the floorboards so violently that a rat ran out from under the mixing desk and sat blinking in the red glow of the power strip. We recorded twelve identical takes of a verse about nothing in particular because neither of us had the energy to climb back up to street level for fresh batteries. It sounded magnificent and terrible in equal measure, exactly like two people with nowhere else to go and nothing better to do with their Tuesday afternoon. We ate a bag of stale crisps found behind the radiator and called it an album.
March
A modified cassette recorder
Marcus dropped the Sony deck down a flight of concrete stairs behind the bodega to see if the compression would improve our snare sound. It didn't improve the snare, but it did weld the battery compartment shut with a pleasing metallic crunch and gave every vocal take a permanent, wheezing hiss that sounded like a dying radiator. Kevin soldered a disconnected guitar cable to the headphone jack and claimed we had invented a proprietary analog warmth that record labels would eventually beg to rent from us for fifty dollars an hour. We spent the rest of the evening trying to dub a two-bar drum break from a scratched jazz record while a passing train shook the foundations and threatened to collapse our entire makeshift studio into the sewer. Our neighbour Gary banged on the ceiling with a broom handle until we played him the loop at four times normal speed, after which he silently closed his window and left us to our misery in the gloom.
October 14
The single looping drum break
We narrowed our entire artistic philosophy down to a single four-second drum loop that we sliced with a razor blade and spliced back together with Scotch tape until the splice point clicked like a metronome on sedatives. Marcus wrote forty-eight verses about the bus schedule and the smell of wet asphalt while Kevin adjusted the tape heads with a cotton swab soaked in rubbing alcohol. When we played the finished master back through a pair of blown-out speakers salvaged from a burnt-out civic centre, the cone of the woofer literally detached itself and drifted gracefully across the floor like a dead autumn leaf. We nodded solemnly at each other, agreed that the low end had never sounded more authentic, and immediately recorded another twenty minutes of deadpan murmuring over the exact same rhythm without changing a single knob. Perfection is just a lack of imagination, or so we told ourselves while sharing our last lukewarm soda.
Session 40 through 61
Unforgiving ninety-two bpm rap
People keep asking us why every song we record moves at precisely ninety-two beats per minute as if we possess some profound rhythmic discipline rather than a broken metronome that only ticks when you smack it hard against the side of the desk. Kevin insists it is the natural pulse of urban decay while Marcus just wants to finish recording before the electricity gets shut off for non-payment again. We spent three hours today trying to capture the subtle acoustic nuances of a leaky pipe dripping rhythmically into an empty bucket of plaster, only to realize the tape had run out twenty minutes prior and we were just talking to ourselves in the dark. It is a glamorous lifestyle filled with hollow victories and cold instant coffee, and we wouldn't trade it for anything except perhaps a working toaster and a chair that doesn't wobble when the bass drum hits.
