It's hard to believe it's taken this long for a proper retrospective of legendary Los Angeles collective C.V.E. We Represent Billions is a crucial portrait of one of the West Coast's most low-key influential crews - a hydra-like collective of rappers, producers, designers and engineers who were key members of the Good Life Cafe's open mic scene, going on to inspire artists like Jurassic 5, Kendrick Lamar amongst many other.

Initially called Chillin Villain Posse before morphing into Chillin Villain Empire in the late 1980s, they eventually centered around the core trio of Riddlore, NgaFsh and Tray-Loc. The crew were years ahead of their time, self-producing music without samples and pioneering stream of consciousness lyrics that still sound fresh and innovative. C.V.E. were self-sufficient and motivated from the beginning, named Chillin Villains because that's how they were perceived by white America.

This social motivation was channeled into their groundbreaking performances at Good Life Cafe, the South Central session that evolved into Project Blowed and later on came to influence LA club night Low End Theory. It was chronicled by Ava Duvernay, herself an MC in short-lived duo Figures of Speech, in her This is the Life documentary, where she interviewed C.V.E. alongside Jurassic 5, Freestyle Fellowship, Abstract Rude and Busdriver.

On We Represent Billions, we're treated to a snapshot of the C.V.E. sound from 1993-2003, their most prolific era. The retrospective collects music from the handful of albums the crew released on their own Afterlife Recordz label (mostly as limited edition CD-R's) plus many previously unreleased tracks and highlights their untethered eccentric creativity and sheer breadth of influence. Whether twisting twitchy West Coast electro on "All Over Da Globe" or free associating over horror synths and foley sounds on "Made in Chillz Ville" there's a sense that their music was just too future for its time.

Assembled from heaving industrial samples and graced by back-and-forth tongue twisting flows, "Thugs and Clips" is as eerie and hard-hitting as anything 2Pac's The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory full-length. Fuzzed-out and unsettling, "Calistylics" welds an ambient synth loop and bone-rattling percussion to Tricky-esque percussion, while the flickering closer "Unicycle" is a cross between Dr. Dre's icy G-gunk pressure and Three 6 Mafia's pitch black lo-fi funk.