Hip Hop News: Fatboi Sharif x noface Preaching In Havana (2024)

noface: “My intent was to transmit my soul. It goes back to the subconscious, I’m trying to release what’s in there. I’ve been making music for almost 10 years, with that goal in mind. This is very raw free-form expressionism. This is like free jazz. I was thinking about all the things I was thinking about at that time, talking with Sharif about a lot of that, and watching movies, and also it’s like 1 year into covid and the whole world seems to be collectively kind of in a paranoid haze… all that just comes out in the music. Preaching In Havana is definitely an album about fear, and life, and death, and soul searching– finding god in babylon. This album reflects noface and Fatboi Sharif, or a part of us and our worldview at least. So I pretty much just threw together a bunch of samples that I had in my house or on my computer… old gospel records.. stuff I had been saving but never flipped. Sometimes l’ll hoard a song I want to sample for a while and then I can just feel when I should use it. It came very clearly and organically. Me and Sharif had recorded most of the tracks and then in one day we fleshed out the message of the album. I was eating a good amount of mushrooms back then, and getting really focused on music. We figured out pretty early there was like a religious, or spiritual undertone to the music, and the rest manifested… the interludes especially.”

Fatboi Sharif on the creative genesis of his projects: “Every project is always a different journey for me, it always starts on a blank canvas with lots of discussion, analyzing things going on in my life at the moment and the world and me finding the perfect beats that could bring those thoughts to life.”

DRHH: You’ve worked w Nack and Divino, Starker and YL. How’d you get put onto Fatboi?

noface: “Most of the artists I work with are my friends or people I’ve actually spent time with, and the music tends to come pretty organically. Honestly, I first met a lot of those people just through my music– they hit me up to work. With Fatboi Sharif we met randomly… I remember the first 2 weeks of January 2021 I was sleeping on the floor in Lungs’ living room and on Phiik’s couch, and Sharif was coming out to both of their cribs at the time just to kick it and record or whatever… I would be in another room making beats with my headphones on or some shit and eventually he just heard me playing a beat out loud and bugged out lol. And I think that same night we started Preaching in Havana.”

DRHH: what’s different about producing for Fatboi?

noface: Nothing really except I know I can go all out. I know Sharif will bump stuff like harsh noise music (laughs). And I know he loves Prince Paul. I do too. And Portishead. I just know I can play anything for him, and try to make any kind of music. But Sharif also has a really interesting process, he’ll go home and sleep with beats playing in his headphones overnight. Then he starts writing. I think we both already kind of make music from the unconscious. Or subconscious. So we got along, and the music made sense. Like I said, music should come naturally. I don’t think a lot about it. I was just hanging out with my friends. Watching Godzilla and shit, Jet Jaguar, 60’s, and making beats. I was also still in school, and my girl was bugging out on me, very hectic time. At some point I think I started to realize we were recording some really weird and scary music, and that maybe we had the potential to make a more serious or abstract kind of album… I think the concept became fully clear to us around then, and we started putting together the whole thing.”

Although it may not file under your average rap album, don’t try and categorize this music though. While it remains hip hop, the soundscapes are atypical, avoiding the structure of your usual boom bap production, just as Fatboi prefers.