On the Rise
BIJI

Formed in Stockholm 2019, Nazari and Frost have worked together to hone a unique brand of hip hop-rooted dance music that pulls in Afrobeat, Latin rhythms and Kurdish tradition. Through this medium, they find that the answer that they seek isn’t as simple as identifying a hero from a book.

For BIJI, legendary status does not emerge from fame or myth. Rather, it’s the part that they play in holding a life, a family, or future together. To understand how they arrived at this idea, the pair take me to the start of their journey — one that began with a casual introduction through a mutual friend that would blossom into a shared, deeply intuitive creative understanding.

Nazari and Frost recall the moment they were introduced by Paul Adamah, founder of the Swedish band Boko Yout. "I think he knew we would become great friends," Frost recalls. "We were just hanging out one day, I was playing piano, and Robin was like, 'Yo, what are you playing? That's really good, you should keep playing.' Robin is the kind of person, it's the friend that you dream to have, that sees these abilities you haven't seen in yourself. He's like, 'Yo, you're pretty crazy at this, you should do this.' I was like, 'Nah, really?' And so I started playing piano, recording it, and then Robin asked me to be part of his album."

That album was a Swedish rap record, and its last track was a poem for Nazari's late father. Frost played piano, Nazari recited, and they made a video from childhood footage his dad had filmed when Nazari was about three. "It's an emotional edit, you know, we're dealing with this crazy heavy subject, really connecting with the family," Frost recalls. "But in the middle of the childhood footage, it glitches onto 'happy birthday to…' and a music video starts. At some point Robin's dad had taped a Kurdish music video onto the end of his birthday, and I'm looking at this thinking, oh my god, this is something special. This is the perfect sample for a song."

They finished the project, but the sample stayed with them. "We remembered it, and we decided, let's gather at my house," Frost says. "We listened to the sample together, and boom, the idea for the project and the first song came from that." The voice on the tape belonged to Nazari's uncle, a celebrated Kurdish artist, which sent Frost seeking out anyone else making music that honours tradition.

"I was like, okay, that's Robin's uncle, a legendary Kurdish artist. Are there any young Kurdish artists doing the music that we listen to in the club?”

The more the pair learned, the more there was to carry. "I got to know about the culture, that the language had been forbidden, all these things," Frost remembers. “And the question we had was: what if you take a language that's once been forbidden and use that language to sing about peace, celebration and love? What happens?”

Neither of them could leave the idea alone. Frost was directing films and commercials, Nazari was acting, and both were doing well enough that stopping meant giving something up. "You know how many shows Robin has turned down just to make music?" Frost laughs. “It's insane.”

Nazari explains his decision as a choice bred out the desire to explore his own creative ownership. "In the Swedish music scene, I felt like, this is who Robin is, and I can't go outside of that. I'm the poet slash serious, conscious rapper. And with movies you get a script, and it's lovely to act, but it's always other people's visions.”

“I think from your side too, making commercials, it's not fully your own vision,” Nazari says to Frost, to which he agrees. “With BIJI it was like, if we wanted to go to the moon and shoot a music video, then we do it. It was creative freedom, and I think that really made us continue."

Their name immortalises the pair’s continued desire for creative freedom, and it all comes back to that first sample that they unearthed. The word “bijî” means "long live" in Kurdish, and it's what Nazari's uncle shouts at a dance party in that old footage. "We have that sample when we play live," Frost smiles. “I have it on a button that I press when people dance. It's connecting in so many different ways. It means long live, to live life, life force. It just feels like a valid representation of what we're trying to do. It's celebration, and how you can build bridges, how you can heal, through celebration.”

Nazari adds that the word carries further than you'd expect, so much that it connects people within the pair’s own culture and beyond. "A lot of people who aren't Kurdish, if you say you're from Kurdistan, the only thing they know is 'bijî', because that's what all the Kurds are saying. 'Long live the Kurdish people.' So it keeps you familiar."

Considering how deep-rooted the music and ethos of BIJI are connected to Kurdish tradition, I ask Nazari and Frost how they decide which sound belongs to which story when traversing so many genres. "It's not a conscious decision,” Frost tells me. “The sound is a mix of our backgrounds and the music we listen to in our free time.” He adds, “Each song has its own will. It sparks sometimes from a sample, sometimes from a melody in your head, playing something at the piano or with a synth, and if you follow the sound and the feeling, you end up somewhere. It's very, very intuitive.”

Nazari says the lack of a formula is the one thing they hold on to. “If you asked an AI to make a BIJI song, it couldn't,” he muses. “It's our references and me and Maceo meeting in the music, our worlds together. It's not reggaeton, it's not hip hop, it's not electronic dance. We really just do what we want to do.”

Although BIJI aim to not be defined as just hip-hop, it is a fertile source of common ground that exists between the duo, and Frost grew up inside it. His dad was a rapper, a producer and an original street dancer, "one of the godfathers of boogaloo popping", and Frost often accompanied him to competitions. "I was sleeping on the dance competition floors, thinking, when can I go home?" Frost laughs. “We had a studio at home, and he was always making me make beats. And hip hop had these beautiful philosophies, especially from that era of the OGs. You couldn't really copy anyone. You had to be original, and it's about the energy. Growing up I'd hear about Run-DMC's first concert at the Roxy in New York, the energy they had on stage.”

When Nazari met Frost's father, something clicked for him too. “It was the first time I was speaking to someone about deep, deep boom bap music and he knew all the names, all the artists I was talking about, all the songs. I was so deep in it when I was young. I was an extremely keep-it-fucking-real type of guy. And Maceo didn't even know half of those songs.”

Driven by what comes across as consistent reminders of serendipity between the pair and their craft, and a mutual passion and appreciation for creating, BIJI spent the first two years following their formation in studios. "We were just experimenting day and night, trying to understand what was what, what this fusion is," Nazari recalls. “We travelled to Germany, to France, to the Netherlands, having sessions with producers, getting to know people in the industry. A lot of BIJI was growing in those rooms.”

The look of the project came from somewhere less expected. Frost describes a viral music video, a viral music video of men in bulletproof vests pointing AK-47s at the camera while singing with sincerity — something that caught his eye. "In my mind it clicked,” he says. “There's something when you hear a sound in an environment you've never put together before. It's like a glitch in the matrix. What would be our way of doing that? A trap hip hop song in Kurdistan with the uncles and drifting, something you've never seen,” he laughs.

But their first shoot was less AK-47s and drifting, and more subtle humour. On the first shoot, Nazari revealed himself to be a natural comic, leading Frost to reconsider what the visual world of BIJI might look like.

“I was like, ‘Robin, you're the Kurdish Charlie Chaplin!’. I thought we were making this serious music video in Kurdistan, and in the first ten minutes I'm like, this might actually be a comedy. So we just changed approach."

And the pair have worked that way ever since. "We approach it as documentary filmmakers," Frost says. "We find stories that excite us, people that excite us, places, towns, and then we go from there. We meet people, we get to know people, and we create stories based on real events, which is exactly how this album was made."

This was also propelled by advice that Nazari received from fellow musicians: the one who seeks will find. "It's really the spirit of BIJI," he says. “We can't create on demand. We're always searching, if it's samples, stories, graphic design, typography. Many people make a song and release it. The first two years we were just searching, and when we feel we're losing it, we say, 'Yo, let's go back to the lab and search.'”

And ultimately, that search led them to LEGENDS, which Nazari sees as the other half of the work that the pair have put out thus far. Their EPs BIJI, Pt. 1 and BIJI, Pt. 2 showed the dance music and the humour but LEGENDS shows how they think. "It's our other side," he says. Frost points out that it also asked more of Nazari on the page.

"We started the project focusing a lot on celebration, and we went more vulnerable in the lyrics. It's been hard to really open up. I think that's why it resonates." He reveals that they very nearly even cut “Tea With Sugar” the week before release, just out of fear of it being too heavy. "I'm like, I don't know about these sad songs, I wish we'd removed it. Then it comes out and everybody's writing that it's their favourite on the album." Nazari's reaction at the time, Frost says, was perfect. "He said, if you feel like you overshared, that's how you know it's a good song."

For Nazari, the openness is bigger than one song. "In my life I've been very censored," he says. “Like, if you say this, it can affect you in this way. If you say this, maybe it's dangerous for your family. And BIJI, both in life and on the creative side, has been a way of freeing yourself, to say whatever you think and be whoever you want. With LEGENDS we got another level of that. It's like, you know what, this is it. I don't give a fuck if something happens or what people think. This is what we think and this is who we are. Now that it's out, I really have that feeling. Freedom of speech, kind of.”

Perhaps that vulnerability can be traced back to how the album first started: with Nazari's mother. Years ago, she wrote a poem about freedom, and Frost suggested they go back to it. "A lot of things cleared up when we read that poem," Nazari says. Frost then sent over a beat called “Legends”, with no lyrics on it. "It was a 58-year-old woman writing about freedom and what freedom is to her, and her story is not out there. From that moment we understood how many stories are untold. We wanted to take them up and tell them, our stories and the other stories.”

The closing track, “Najmedin”, pushes that idea into practice. Najmedin is a Kurdish artist who, in the 1980s, heard a poem on the radio about a woman who had lost her brother and recorded it as a song, one that became symbolic in Kurdistan. BIJI had been listening to it for years. "We were like, you know what, let's re-record it," Nazari says. "It's their song. We don't jump on it. We just recorded it, reproduced it and released it." They're now making a documentary about it, and were filming last week. "It turns out he was friends with Robin's dad," Frost says. “They have a photo together. It's a ridiculous moment, and I think that's what we live for.”

The music videos serve the songs, and the message of LEGENDS, the same way. In Kurdistan they filmed in a cassette shop that Nazari calls a museum, run by a man who inherited it from his father, "who told him stories about when this person met that person a hundred years ago and made a song together". They made a song with Bakhtiyar Saleh, a Kurdish dance music star, so he could be heard internationally. At home they invited friends and kids from Nazari's area into a video and called them their own legends.

The album opens with a blessing, and Frost means that literally. "It's channeling the spirits of the ancestors and asking, do we have your blessings to proceed? Because I need it." From that, I ask whether having honoured their ancestors gives the two of them more freedom to expand now.

"I don't know. I think we're always looking back,” Frost says. “It calibrates you in the right direction. If you're a little bit lost, you can always look back. They're there, watching over you." Nazari agrees, emphasising that BIJI is more than the two of them. “Our families and friends are a big part of how we started. Maceo's younger brother went round showing everyone the unreleased music in all the youth centres. Sarah has been with us from the beginning, performing with us. Their spirit, if we don't have it, it's not the same thing.”

And compiling such a meaningful work was certainly not a quick process. Nazari says the title track took four or five days just to settle the melody, and his mother rewrote the lyrics several times before they were right. “Tea With Sugar” started in Berlin with a few top lines, but Nazari revisited it again before production could even be considered. "It's a lot of days into every song," Nazari says. Frost was thinking about the people who wouldn't understand a word. “We recorded 'Legends' so many times to get it right, to make sure that even if you don't understand Kurdish, you still feel it. What is the flow necessary in a melody for that to translate? It has to pass a couple of checkboxes to feel universal.”

With the record finally out in the world, Frost says the response has given him confidence. “It's like, damn, we can really do this,” he smiles, with a sense of earned satisfaction. “We get messages from people from all different backgrounds loving the album. It's an interesting album, it goes through many genres, but it has this really strong red thread through it.”

Nazari says that, on a more introspective level, the process of releasing a full-length work and its resulting reception made him stop and define what they had. “When we started I didn't understand what we had. It just worked. This time I needed to break down who I am, what BIJI is, what our relationship is. And it's in many ways religious. We can't lead it. We need to follow it. Follow the wind and the energy. We can't force it.”

To go against the grain, Nazari admits, yields frustrating consequences. "My best and my worst side is that I push really hard. I can't always have my foot on the gas. I need to brake sometimes, otherwise I crash." Frost, he says, is his reminder. “You know your boundaries. When I see you having them, it reminds me of mine.”

Some of that push can be alleviated by simply following the guiding light of perspective, seeking to understand and reference the stories of others. Nazari works at a youth centre, and when he wanted to know what a legend really is, he asked the kids there. They spent a full day constructing an elaborate mind map to get to the bottom of it.

"I wanted to hear what they would say a legend is, because for me these kids are the legends," he says. "When you say legends, you have this first idea of the ones in the books, the old Greek whatever. But I think the legends in this case are the people around us, the untold stories." His sister Sarah, also a poet, performs a spoken piece on the album that Nazari says explains it best in a more concise form.

"Those with their heart and their hands make this world spin around," Nazari recites. “Those are the legends.”