After co-running a successful hip-hop music label, Brian Brater is moving from the boardroom to the studio.
The co-founder of Rawkus, which released seminal titles by respected rappers including Mos Def, Talib Kweli and Pharoahe Monch, he has teamed up with Amir H Fallah for a Gorillaz-type audiovisual crew called Sherbert Gang.
Dubai art aficionados will be well aware of Fallah’s talents – the Iranian-American artist has showcased his work in several Dubai galleries over the past few years.
Sherbert Gang announced themselves last month with an eponymous EP. It is a novel co-production: Fallah looked after the art direction and animation, while Brater produced eight surprisingly left-field, robotically voiced tracks, which variously recall James Blake, Drake and Daft Punk.
A creative entrepreneur, Brater says that the success of Rawkus came at the price of stunting his creativity. A talented bass player and budding producer, his hectic work schedule as a record executive forced him to temporarily shelve those ambitions.
“The beats that Rawkus producers were making were better than the beats I could provide at that time,” he says. “I wanted to focus on building the best record company that I could.”
After departing from Rawkus, he launched the popular digital-media company UPROXX, and quietly began making beats again.
However, it took “two, three years” before he felt ready to release something. By then, a more elaborate idea was forming, featuring Fallah, a fellow creative soul he long admired.
“He was the ultimate curator of art and design around Los Angeles, so it just made sense to invite Amir to participate.”
Fallah had previously run an acclaimed art periodical called Beautiful/Decay ("the most beautiful magazine ever printed", says Brater), and made a bold selection for the collective's first animation.
Illustrator Andre Smirny had never directed a music video, but his film for Sherbert Gang's sci-fi soul cut Far Away is hugely distinctive: a colourful, slightly subversive cartoon about a man searching for intergalactic lunch. It was Brater's concept.
“His contribution was, ‘What if we make an animation where this guy is walking and pieces of debris fly at him, and at the end of it the guy bites into a cosmic sandwich?’” says Fallah with a laugh. “I thought, ‘That’s completely ridiculous.’ But I liked it so much – ‘It’s just weird enough, it’ll work.’”
Sherbert Gang’s musician/artist dynamic sounds broadly similar to Gorillaz – Blur singer Damon Albarn and comic-book artist Jamie Hewlett’s cartoon band – but Fallah is keen for the collective to grow in different directions, working “with everything from a costume designer to a dancer or theatrical actor, to someone who’s experienced in light shows”.
For Brater, working with non-musicians is proving revelatory. He and Fallah also have clear and distinct roles in the group.
“We’re not fighting over songwriting because only one of us does it,” Brater says. “He’ll generally show me something and I’ll go, ‘That’s incredible. Can we make it a little more like this?’”
The duo are also unlikely to tire of each other: With Fallah residing in LA and Brater in New York, Sherbert Gang is a thoroughly modern, tech-friendly project.
“I’ve known Brian for close to 10 years,” Fallah says, “ and I think we’ve only been in the same room five or six times.”
In fact, the in-demand Fallah is fitting Sherbert Gang around a weightier project: his latest exhibition, Almost Home, for Dubai's Third Line Gallery. Due to open next May, it will feature portraits of displaced Iranians and "deals with a lot of concepts around longing to return to your homeland".
As for Brater – who during his Rawkus days released numerous socially-conscious records, notably Mos Def's Black on Both Sides – he says "I don't want to be waxing poetic about the ills of the world" with Sherbert Gang.
The debut EP does feature a futuristic military drum-style track called Police State, however, inspired by the racial tensions in the United States.
America is likely to have a new president by the time the collective complete their next audiovisual experiment ready – will the music be even spikier if Donald Trump triumphs?
“If the election doesn’t go right, I’m coming back with a hardcore record,” the producer jokes. “Pure noise – it’ll be painful.”
In reality, the Sherbert guys have talked of targeting film festivals by creating “a short film where it’s all music and animation, maybe 45 minutes,” says Brater.
“Making it very intense for the viewer, literally surrounding them with screens, and big sound,” he adds.
artslife@thenational.ae
