Morgunblaðið – Quarashi in the Studio
Sunday, September 21st. 1997 – Sunday article.
The wait for the new album of rap group Quarashi has started. Árni Matthíasson sat with the members of the band in the studio of “Nýjustu tækni og vísindi” until late night.
A PECULIAR group is gathered in the basement in the Bergstaðarstræti, all types of boys, skaters, rockers, and neat schoolboys. They kid around and make jokes, speak a language that no one understands but them as often happens with friends who have been together for long and done many things. The guest never gets the feeling that this is a band, they are too different for that, and yet a band it is, it’s the band Quarashi, that has just come from Nýjustu tækni og vísindi, the studio of the members of Lhooq, Pétur and Jóhann.
Quarashi released their first single before last Christmas, 500 copies of Switchstance, which had four songs on it. The record was a limited release, partly to be the first rap album in Iceland, but maybe also to check out if Steini, a laid back skater and Hössi and Sölvi, two rockers, would fit together and could make something new. Sölvi took care of the music, some sort of “rock-hop” and Steini and Hössi took care of the rap. On the outskirts of the group was Richard, a friend of Sölvi from the band Stjörnukisi, DJ and skater much like Steini.
When the first single came out there wasn’t really a “band”, just this group of friends but then there was such a fuss around the album that they found themselves compelled to form a band officially. They say it themselves that they started playing all over the place and got onto the top list. “And then lots of big fat men came along and said: “Ahaha, I’ll make you famous”, but then Stefán Igólfsson came and saved us, he took the job and said “You’ll do it like this and that” and we’ve followed that plan, since he’s the only man in the music business that we trust.”
That’s what the guys have to say as we sit in the basement studio, in heavy and humid air conditions. They are close to finishing the first album, but haven’t quite realized yet what has happened. If you ask them about the last months you get four different stories and it’s almost like they weren’t even on the same planet during that time. Maybe it was all the fuss and offers coming left and right that put them out of touch, but a lot more came to play, a song had to be written for a movie, another song had to be remade for a compilation, a collaboration with Tvíhöfði and so on. Finally there was time to lock themselves up in the studio where nothing better awaited, none of them had known such work, Sölvi had played music with other bands on records before, but that wasn’t a big deal, just setting up the instruments, finding a sound and counting in.
Can’t work unless under pressure.
When the guys of Quarashi went into a studio they didn’t have much to work with, six songs finished and tried out in concert. They take it lightly today that they went in the studio so unprepared and say that they can’t work without being under pressure anyways. The work is conducted in the way that Sölvi sits sweating at home and makes the beats and instrumentals, brings it in on tape and then it’s put up in computers and appropriate tools. When the song is ready Hössi and Steini take care of the rapping and Richard Dj’s into it all for decoration and filling. The work is going pretty fast they say, when they finally get to work, but Sölvi’s friends kid that he needs twenty mixes of each song, can’t let go of a song and can hear flaws in them that other people can’t hear at all. That aside Sölvi is the music director in this band, he lays the lines and you can hear it on the pieces coming through the speakers, since they’re working on the scratching on one song, that Sölvi is going into some sort of breakbeat or triphop alongside with the rap, he’s making contemporary rap with his friends.
Steini and Hössi write the lyrics, which contain less words than most people think; Sölvi says that he was really surprised when he saw the lyrics on paper for the first time. The guys write very different lyrics; Hössi tells stories whereas Steini writes about friends and daily life and often reflects on supernatural things. Life is a lyric he says looking mysterious, without explaining it any further. Sölvi says that the lyrics on the album came as a comfortable surprise to him, that they were more outthought and sarcastic than he expected.
Rap as it is in America has lyrics that are about dreary things like bad cops, racism and gimmicking enemies. Many who start rapping buy into that and start imitating that as if they were brought up in the ghetto amongst black people. The Quarashi guys smile when they are told that they don’t sound miserable enough in their lyrics; “We only live in Iceland, and even if the west end is just like the Bronx, we’re still just in Iceland”.
The most open form of music there is.
Sölvi writes the music, but when it comes to talking about music the guys all have their opinion, they come alive where they have been sitting or almost lying down. They have very different tastes in music, maybe Sölvi and Richard have the most similar tastes, and that would be because they are open to anything and say that they listen to all music and are actually more open minded the older they get. “What fascinates me about rap,” says Sölvi, “is that you can sample everything, like just before Richard was scratching and old Rickshaw record.” He becomes pensive for a while. “On the other hand I find it strange that there are “pure hip-hoppers” because hip-hop is the most open form of music there is, everything is possible,” he says and then adds smiling “Actually there’s a whole generation of pure hip-hoppers coming up, narrow minded and prejudice.”
Richard doesn’t entirely agree with Sölvi’s words. “Still , the kids here are much better tuned in than the kids in Denmark and Sweden, they are more on the current, there’s a lot of talent around and a lot of young boys who are starting out, who are asking me how they should start out. There’s a lot of bands who are rapping over instrumentals from other bands, “he says and recalls: “Just like the rap band I was in back in 1992, it was called Soul Train Party, STP, we started making the songs but the lyrics never came, in that time I almost got beaten up for being a hip- hopper,” he says and pulls up a Rickshaw record that he’s going to scratch for the song.
”I just hope that these new bands won’t be narrow minded,” says Sölvi, “that they’ll be open for everything that’s going on.” He recalls the time when he was working at a social center and brought in rap cd’s for the guys who were thinking about becoming rappers. That’s when he played the basics for them, Public Enemy, but they said that it was impossible to listen to, just Old School and nothing interesting about it.
Sölvi is the one who makes the beats and basically the songs as formerly stated and the other fellows have their input if they have one, otherwise they provide the lyrics and leave it at that. Sölvi actually says that he usually throws most of the sounds out of the songs once he starts working on them in a studio, for example one of the songs on Switchstance was built on “at least 33 sounds” “Then Steini came in with his rap and when me and Hrannar started listening to the rap we took out all the sounds except the rap and the beat and it worked out pretty well,” says Sölvi.
The focus is on the singer.
The guys from Quarashi aren’t working in expensive studios with famous people pushing the buttons like the “big fat guys” offered them and Sölvi says he couldn’t even think of working on this album with any other people than those who worked with them on their first single, and he looks at Hrannar who hasn’t said much. “The only thing I really wanted was to work with the people we worked with last time, not to get some industry and business people to record or a commercial agency to do the cover.”
The work is going slow but well, it took us a while to get going, nothing happened the first week and then we had to do the songs for Blossi in the meantime and Krókódílamaðurinn. We couldn’t hurry it, the focus is just on the singers and it has to be done well, it has to be made to work with a perfect beat, you can’t just let some bullshit come from you and be released, it has to be done well.”
As said before the single was very popular and sold out in a matter of a very short time and since the guys wouldn’t make more copies it wasn’t long until it was being bought and sold at very high prices. It’s not very long since there was news of a copy that was sold for 10.000 kr. and the guys laugh a lot when that story is brought up since they don’t even have copies themselves; Actually Steini has a copy and Richard’s sister has one too, Hössi doesn’t have one though because he sold his for beer.
“It was tempting to press more copies,” says Sölvi, “I’m happy we didn’t cave in to that pressure. It was actually a good time for a single, but that time is over, they have become too cheap to repeat it.”
The “Icelandic question” is the big question.
Quarashi went into a studio with 13 songs. Their aim is that the first draft of the cd will be at least about two hours, no matter what the final outcome will be. “Maybe we can cut-down when we start mixing.” Those who don’t have the single or can’t afford buying it on a black market can be happy about the fact that the songs from Swithcstance are on the album, even though they are very changed. The song Switchstance will thus be there in it’s third form, because they have before made changes to it, made it lighter and softer, that actually sounded really bad and they all completely agree on that, frown and look away and all say at the same time that the compilation version of Switchstance sucked.
The “Icelandic question” was the big question when an Icelandic rap band comes up; can you call it Icelandic unless they rap in Icelandic? The guys agree, they say that the Icelandic had been in their way until they started writing Icelandic lyrics and found out that it was actually easier than writing in English. “Of course we know Icelandic much better than English and thus it’s much easier to write in Icelandic for us, you don’t have to look as much for words,” says Steini. Sölvi agrees, with the notice that he hasn’t heard the song after the recordings finished; it’s waiting on the tape and maybe there will be time later in the night. “The recordings for that song were really fun sessions, we had it down that it would never fucking work, then the vibe was that it was a little cool and then all of a sudden it all clicked and became really great.” He says and Steini adds: “This is much harder but it’s incredibly fun. No one has rapped in Icelandic over rap music, so there was nothing to listen to so we could hear where others went wrong.” “We also had to watch out that it wouldn’t become some pop song with a chorus, we picked one of the heaviest songs so that no one would get the idea that we were sellouts, “says Sölvi.
“The only problem with writing in Icelandic is that it’s easier to rap in English, it flows better than Icelandic.”
The serious incident
This is where Hössi comes into the conversation; “It might be a cliché, but Icelandic is much like German, I have never heard good German rap, you have to look for the words really hard and then maybe you don’t get the meaning you want out of them. We still have the ambition to make at least one Icelandic song, preferably two”
The expectations for the new Quarashi album are really high, much higher than they have been in a long time in Icelandic music, but they say that they take it lightly, the work on the album took it’s time and has been hard work. “But it doesn’t rest very heavy on us. Everything has worked out well even though there have been some incidents, some serious,” says Sölvi but suddenly stops, he has said too much and his friends smirk. Asking about what the serious incident was doesn’t lead to anything, the guys answer with bullshit and try do avoid the subject. Obviously it’s a sensitive matter.
Sölvi says, sort of to apologize, that it’s an incident that they don’t want to talk about: “It’s just been crazy pressure to record this album, I’ve done it before and it was a piece of cake, just play and record, the singing was taken in one lockout and then 12 songs were mixed in 12 hours. It’s a lot of work and a lot harder, but even if we’re locked inside there are people who live in the house and we can’t be loud during the night, so we are forced to go home, thank God.”
It’s clear now that the guys are getting tired, they’ve been in the studio since the evening and until late night and after a few discussions on music, whether rap is punk and the old foxes are finished we fall into a conversation about skaters, flow and three-sixty, “which is better Tony Hawks or Neil Hendrix” and how skaters have very different styles and how their flow isn’t too different from the flow of rappers.
After the talk and the work have dissolved into bullshit, Sölvi decides that enough is enough and he wants to hear “the Icelandic song.” Hrannar puts it on and we all listen. The Beatles visit in the opening refrain, but after that it’s original Icelandic rap; revolutionary in a tight soup of beat spiced with breakbeat and rock-phrases. Good song and Steini and Hössi do a great job. When the song is over Sölvi turns to Hössi and says pensively: “What are these lyrics about?” Hössi shrugs.
Morgunblaðið, Árni Matthíasson
Photography/Björg Sveinsdóttir