WHAT do Christians, tigers and schools have in common? Nothing.
But Luc Vermeer and Sebastiano Zanasi have put those three random things together to form their psychedelic hip hop outfit, Christian Tiger School. They are the architects of beats that ooze through the speakers, tickling your ears, teleporting you on an aural journey. Discovering them at a Kool Turkey event at Zula Bar a few months ago left a huge impression on me.
Upon first hearing them, their genre is hard to define. It’s electro whimsicalness fused with break beats. Sitting down for a chat with the boys before their gig my first question was: what does Christian School Tiger mean, does it hold any religious connotation?
“It has no meaning really. When we figured out that we actually wanted to do something with our beats, we pretty much just thought of names and it came up randomly.
“We started laughing about it as a joke and then we thought it’s actually a cool name. It’s just our personalities, we both are really weird. We talk sh*t to ourselves so it just came out, in one word – Christian Tiger School. It’s quite cool and not like The Renegades,” laughs Zanasi.
The duo first began as a hip hop trio, but that concept soon fizzled out.
“We never really got anywhere with it. We made one song, but there was this little piece of drive that just wasn’t there,” says Vermeer.
It was during Vermeer’s visit to the US last year that he immersed himself in the sounds of Flying Lotus and SamIam. The bands are big influences of the duo’s music and spurred them on their path.
“When I heard it I went nuts and I got back and was like: ‘I got some new shit for you’ and he had already heard it and I didn’t even tell him about it. We both discovered it by chance. Every single day we just made beats,” laughs Vermeer.
“It was terrible, it was really bad,” Zanasi chirps in. Spreading their love for the psychedelic hip hop genre, for only about eight months now, it was the understanding of the elements of the genre they had to master.
“We try to give it something more than a sampled song, before it was for rapping, but this a lot of detail and it’s made for someone not to rap on, it’s made for instrumental in mind. Luc is the hip hop head. I’m more the electronic side so I like the more chilled, wavy stuff.
“When you shove it (hip hop and electronic) together this is what you get because normally with this stuff the drums wouldn’t be so hard, but because of Vermeer’s influence you get that more hip hop feel,” says Zanasi.
Adding a good twist with the merging of both worlds each song from Electric Mountain to Carlton Banks is something fresh to the ear.
“In South Africa it seems like people have never heard this stuff before. I think we just had good timing, so people think, ‘Oh you guys are the first ones to do it’, but there actually are people who have been doing this for quite a while such as Remy Gold, White Knight and Oxblood, but they’re a little bit more reserved so I don’t think they really came out. They just played and didn’t really push it so I think it’s a bit of luck that got us noticed,” smiles Vemeer.
Luck aside, it would be hard not to notice these mixologists, as on stage the duo function as a powerhouse team. Their skilled DJ-ing techniques, unexpected breaks sliding in rap ad libs and bass drops get radical head bumps. And it may just be the fact that they are ADD sufferers who give it that winning extra kick.
“It doesn’t feel like it though, I mean, we don’t take medication or anything,” laughs Zanasi.
“But I can see the way we are compared to the crowd, we’re not normal. We get totally into it. We do what we want.”
Their EP is due for release later this year, with the hopes of being signed by a major record label.
• To download their tracks visit www.soundcloud.com