Abdominal and the Obliques

Toronto emcee Abdominal has toured the world with legendary rap groups like Jurassic 5, playing some of today’s biggest stages, including the UK’s massive Glastonbury Festival along the way.

But for all of his success, Abs (aka Andy Bernstein) was growing increasingly tired of jumping around, trying to make his lyrics heard over the booming beats. So he decided to take a radically different approach, and “Sitting Music” is the result: a hip-hop record unlike any other and perhaps the quietest rap album of all time, representing – in Abs’ own words – “the finest in middle-aged hip-hop!” A top-notch storyteller, Abdominal delivers his unique blues-hop sound filled with humour literally sitting down, while the sampled beats have been replaced with a fantastic bluesy guitar licks and percussion, courtesy of Abdominal’s new band, The Obliques.

Presented by the Koffler Centre of the Arts together with the Toronto Fringe Festival.

ABOUT ABDOMINAL AND THE OBLIQUES

Firstly, I’m not going to pretend this is someone else writing about me in the third person. This is Andy/Abs. Hi there. So, I like rapping and I’m pretty good at it. But I’m also old (by rap standards at least). And as a result, I was getting a little tired of having to jump up and down on stages every night, screaming, just so that my raps could be heard over the super-loud beats playing in the background. So I decided to make some changes. My first move was to assemble a band (“The Obliques”). Well, they’re not really a band…more like two guys playing percussion and a guitar…but I like saying I have a band.

That took care of the music-being-too-loud problem. “But what about the jumping around bit?”, you ask? Good question…we sit down the whole show, like the verging on middle-aged men that we are. Basically, it’s awesome and I haven’t been this excited about making and performing music in years! I should add here, we have a new record out (on Pinwheel Music), called “Sitting Music” (for obvious reasons).

And that’s about all I have to tell you at the moment.That said, because this is a bio, I guess I’m supposed to wow you with a list of my past musical accomplishments. I’m going to try to do that in max. two sentences, because, frankly, it’s boring as shit for all concerned in my opinion (I’d rather just let the music speak for itself as much as possible).

Anyway, I can sum it up by saying I’ve been lucky enough to have had some pretty damn cool experiences thanks to music over the past few years…played the legendary Glastonbury Festival twice, toured the UK and Europe with Jurassic 5, opened for Roy Ayers in London, won the SOCAN Echo prize for best Canadian song in 2007, hosted the annual SOCAN awards show in 2008 and 2011, toured all over the world with the UK’s DJ Format, filmed three videos in LA, did songs with some of my idols (Chali 2na, Cut Chemist, Gift of Gab, Kurtis Blow, my mom, etc.), and somehow managed to (just barely) keep all the bills paid along the way.