Two of my favorite people in Chicago have gotten together to make a project that absolutely strikes my tastes. Lo-fi beats with poetic unpredictable flow. Qari is hands down one of the most legendary rappers of our time. Sliime makes some of my favorite style of music and just is the shit. Both of them are in fact.
I’ve only heard a few tracks prior to mastering, but the shit was FIRE.
It was a gloomy and foggy night in the fall. The sun had just set and the sky was NAVY blue. My favorite shade of blue. My little brother. Jackson had been riding around on his orange BMX bike all the time and I thought the image was very artistic. So I grabbed him and told him to ride around. I followed on a skateboard with my ronin gimbal in hand.
Shortly after, I called Qari and said “send me a track real quick.” This is very symbolic of the process he and I follow. Everything we have ever made is just on the spot, on a limb, a glitch of time in the matrix. I value this harmonious collaboration. I do not care for collaboration so much. I find it can mud my vision. However there are a select few that it just clicks with.
I had shot some other scenes with Qari (maybe we will put them to work). However, we weren’t really able to complete the music video as a whole. SO i was just sitting on this awesome scene of my little brother riding around.
OF COURSE, Qari randomly hit me up after they announced the date release of “Operation Hennessey”. He said hey man just make a commercial with this. I had questions and he just said “this is Yak’s commercial”. Boom ideas clicked and I added a small sound score to it, some graphics inspired by Lo-Fi culture and here we are. Wisam of course supported me and complimented the video “you a beast Yak”. It’s friends like this that keep me going. It’s been a dark time in my life as I am going through some transitions and failures. I have even contemplated quitting film as a business and only doing it as a hobby. People like this make the world go round. Thank you sllime, qari, wisam and devan for always providing me a space to “do me”.
More to come.
-Yak
Here is some more work from Qari and I in the past.