KPIST ENEMIES OF SILENCE ALBUM NONS, MNW RELEASE: AUGUST 26, 2002 REVIEW: SEPTEMBER 18, 2002

Kpist are my saviours. Swedish hip hop has exploded in popularity, and has consequently been streamlined into mindnumbing dullness and conformity. Our only fervent hope is that heroes like Kpist grab their antique synthesizers from their northern headquarters, set siege to Stockholm and fire their analogue bass lines right into the masses of unimaginative crap rappers that control our capital.
It is unfair to confine Kpist into the narrow confines of hip hop. They swerve wildly between funk, rock and electronica, injecting this diversity into the twitching body of hip hop.
Since their last album "Voltage Controlled" from 1997, Kpist have emigrated from the garage into the studio, edging from rock towards hip hop, but their new professionalism has not robbed them of their cockiness or their inventive spirit.
Kpist, a band from Umeå in the north of Sweden, is a different kind of hip hop than the purist movement in Stockholm, where the music seems redundant and preference is given to the swelling egos of bragging celebrity rappers. That's when we need something like Kpist's "C64", a vocoder hit wonder about a computer game character escaping the screen into reality: "You ask me why you're all made of dots, and why you've always been chased by robots, they don't know that it makes you sick, and that your movement's decided by a joystick."
Kpist aren't the greatest rappers in Sweden, or the most distinguished musicians. It's not that they will redefine the boundaries of music or invent the future. They just rock. And sometimes that's enough to blow it all to pieces.

MATTIAS HUSS