What's Behind the Mask?
Hip-hop duo Saibil and Batalion reveal by concealing

What truths are theatrical masks, or the masks we wear in our everyday lives, hiding from the world?

Jerome Saibil says they're not hiding anything.

"I don't think it hides elements of people's personalities, I think it unleashes the multiple aspects of everybody's personality," he said in an interview last week.

"Our goal is to embrace that aspect and bring it to the forefront, and to let people know that that is our gig, that's what we do."

Saibil is part of the hip-hop duo the Grafenberg All-Stars with his longtim collaborator Eli Batalion. The group gets its launch Friday night at Le Swimming on St. Laurent Blvd. An album will follow this fall.

Saibil and Batalion have made a career of doing the unexpected by taking artistic forms and turning them upside down. They made a huge impact with their Fringe Festival hit JOB: The Hip-Hop Musical, which tells the story of the Biblical book of Job in hip-hop rhyme. They then followed that with a sequel: JOB II: The Demon of the Eternal Recurrence, which most recently played in Montreal in January at the Centaur Theatre's Wildside Festival. They'll be back doing Job in Scotland in August.

With Grafenberg, the pair is returning to a project they started several years back, which again taps into the pair's interest in music and theatricality, but this time without the formal structure of a play.

The group is named after Dr. Ernest Gräfenberg, who's famous for discovering the "G" spot. Saibil says the goal of the group is to "hit the aural G spot of hip-hop" through their music.

"The result is a cartoonish hip-hop style where we use different voices, play different characters," Saibil says. "It's very grandiose, kind of like Frank Zappa.

"We're going to still do what we do, what we feel passionately about, which is crazy mask wearing, crazy character playing, off-the-wall histrionics."

He says that in music, people are used to the opposite, of watching a performer who expresses their emotions in a straightforward way.

"People go to see who the performer really is -- to see them really wear their heart on their sleeve."

Saibil goes under the moniker Bushman; Batalion is VowelMovement.

Bushman comes from a street performer Saibil saw at Pier 39 in San Francisco, who has been in the same location for 25 years. He hides behind a fake bush, and then shakes a branch and frightens tourists as they pass by.

"It's hilarious, and it's brilliant. He evokes this huge reaction from crowds.

"I thought that was a crazy idea to use very little to evoke huge emotions in your audience like that."

Batalion's name comes from the deciding when to contain and when to release certain vowels and consonants.

Saibil says commercial hip-hop has been corrupted in recent years, much like rock'n'roll was -- but a lot faster. Both, he says, had a real outlaw element when they first started.

"In rock, the producer started coming into the forefront, and they started contriving rock acts, to the point where the Billboard charts started to reflect music that wasn't the best music."

In the case of hip-hop, the advent of music downloading made it possible for the form to be copied and to become commercial much earlier.

"Hip-hop has spawned "hip-pop" without fully peaking," he says. "It's still the music parents don't like; it's still got that outlaw element like rock, but unlike rock it's gotten corrupted faster than it could blossom."

The Grafenberg All-Stars play Le Swimming, 3643 St. Laurent Blvd., this Friday night. Info: 282-7665. Tickets are $7 at the door. Doors open at 9, show starts at 10:30. Toronto's Blues Underdog is also on the bill.

— Craig McKee