Opeth and Katatonia have created such successful careers for themselves that it's easy to forget both bands didn't instantly take off. Back in the early 90s, Opeth's Mikael Åkerfeldt and Katatonia's Jonas Renkse used to dick around with being a Swedish rap duo in their spare time. What else are you gonna do when you're waiting around to be famous?
Here's what Åkerfeldt had to say via The PRP.
“I haven’t spoken about this a lot in interviews, but I have done demos with a rap band I had with Jonas, the singer from Katatonia. We were poor, we had no money, we had shitloads of spare time because our bands weren’t going anywhere—so we made these demos, and one of them was a rap group we had. So I have done some rap—in Swedish.”
Of course, we'll probably never hear them, though maybe the fart music will make it onto a bonus disc of an upcoming Katatonia album? Farts and extremely somber, sobering music seems like a totally logical pairing.
“Well, they’re shit. They’re absolute shit! We can’t have been too old, doing something like that. All we did was smoke cigarettes, drink coffee and record these stupid fucking side projects. We had a country band, a rap band… we had one band where the music was just farts. And it was named Heinz, after Heinz beans. I’m not sure I’d want them to blow up on the internet, but it might be fun to sit down with someone I really respect and say, ‘Listen to this!'”
Fartatonia and whatever good Opeth/rap group name I can't think of right now will both be dropping records in 2018.
