Athanai gets into the cast with "Rock Repa BR".

The energy that Athanai displays on stage is not little, it is hardly comparable and it is not an exclusive certainty of this server; however, I have also been able to verify that a similar spark can be detonated spontaneously while preparing a coffee and lighting a cigarette, or after the promise to look for a video or album that he treasures in his laptop, of some of the musical heroes we have in common.

This morning, infected by this momentum and anxious for the meeting, with the character of an "interview" that we have agreed for a few minutes, or maybe hours, depending on the indecipherable regularity of the P3, I decided to recklessly make the trip to his house on foot.

But it is not the chords of Sea Wallsthose who accompany me on my journey through Santa Catalina, nor does it sound like Habanero On this occasion another powerful sound has come shuddering and dancing in my ears, mixing with the bustle of the streets, the sun, the queues. Rock Repa, its creator calls it.

"Tell me what, have you had coffee yet?" my host asks. "Water first," I think I answer, while confirming that despite the hike and the heat, in the next few minutes, or maybe hours, the intensity is going to be guaranteed. Three, two, one, zero....

Rock Repa BR is the title of your new album, after four studio albums and one live album, several Cubadisco awards and having competed in editions of the Grammy Awards, the result of many years of involvement in music areas as diverse as trova, hip hop, the grungynew metal, but always in a very personal and consistent way. Do you consider it a concession or a new challenge in your career to recently assume sonorities that are within the urban, specifically the cast?

For me it is neither a concession nor a challenge. Music is music, and I perceive it as an addictive puzzle game, where if you fit the pieces well, there is no reason for anything to fail. There is no genre better than another, there are only preferences and that is where talent and experience come in to create, so that there are no barriers when it comes to perceiving the work. Rock Repa BR is an album that is meant to be danced to from beginning to end.

I always wanted to do urban music like hip hop and somehow get closer to Cuban popular dance music as I do in this new album. It turns out that the cast has a bit of both. It has, in the percussions, sounds emblematic of trap and reggaeton but with a different rhythmic structure, closer to rumba, and it also includes melodic discourses that remind us, although they are not the same, of timba choruses. Everything has its time and in my case, after the experience of all these years, I think the time has come to venture into sounds with a more Cuban identity. Anyway, I'm fusing repa with rock sound elements, that's why I call it rock repa.

But looking back, in 1997, a little more than 25 years ago, you started your recording career with the CD Seventh Heavenalthough many do not know that in those days you produced for the Primera Base troop the album Just like youWhat was already urban in that Athanai?

At that time the term urban music was not used. The industry had its genres for the commercialization of music, but never like now that there is an endless number of classifications. Before putting together my rock band in the nineties, I had a formation with which I did many house music concerts and mixed singing and rap parts in the songs. Hip hop was starting to catch on in the island, then I saw a video of Cypress Hill with Antrax fusing hip hop with rock and then I adopted that premature rap metal in some songs. I never made a hip hop album except for the one I produced for Primera Base, although the first rap that was recorded with a salsa orchestra in the nineties, I recorded it in the song No skull babyby NG La Banda, included in their album From my backyard. If rapping is now considered urban, I've always had my fix because to date I've incorporated rap into many of my songs.

For a musician to dabble in the most popular genre of music glue of the moment would seem to be a guarantee of swimming (and dancing) in safe waters, but in your case, you seem to be moving against the current, renewing yourself and changing a lot of codes.

Yes, I am going against the current, renewing myself and changing codes. All eras are different and it is not at all unreasonable to appropriate the sonorities that accompany them. I have not been afraid to move into a less comfortable zone, even when artist friends have called me crazy for approaching this genre that they consider inferior. But today, with the final product already out there, I know of some famous non-celebrities who are trying to reach my co-producer to work with him, so I'm not that crazy, I'm not that crazy.

Courtesy of Athanai

 Why BR?

Even though my stage name is Athanai, after the song Seventh HeavenI was left with El Blanco Rapero. One afternoon, the young scriptwriter and director Amén Perugorría told me that BR could be allegorical to Blanco Rapero and Blanco Repa and, to tell the truth, I liked it. In any case, it is just another pseudonym, according to these times where language is economy. Wow, pure marketing (laughs).

The cast as you know, is a variant created mostly for a young audience and that also has among its main figures very young artists, do you think you can be accepted by that generation?

Although the protagonists of this sonority are young people, no one is safe from a Cuban clave splitting a beat electronic in the middle of an almost rumbly polyrhythm. This music is for everyone. As long as you have desire, strength and health, everything is possible. Cast right now is part of the Cuban cultural heritage, like it or not. It is the latest creation of the Cuban musical machinery as mambo or chachachá were in their time, only colored with the timbre consumed by the world's youth.

Aren't you worried about disappointing the rock guild with this new facet? What have your musician friends told you?

I never thought about it. I may also have let them down when I released the album. Return toThis is an album of contemporary songs closer to the trova, which gave us the satisfaction of being an official selection for the Latin Grammy and winning that year's Cubadisco. I really do not know if anyone will be disappointed, the truth is that I compose and record what vibrates me at every moment. It's spontaneous, I have no prejudices with music and I love to experiment and get out of my comfort zone. Some musicians are very orthodox and others are not. Some have been horrified to learn that there is a musician creating a rare symbiosis of repa with distorted guitars, without even having heard the songs! and others have been surprised to unravel the complex musical framework that makes up this new style.

Is it as easy as many people think to tackle this sound? How was the production work for this new project?

It has not been easy, but it has been a lot of fun. I've been developing the album for a year and a half. I guarantee that no song on Rock Repa BR is improvised, all the arrangements are taken care of in detail. Just because the genre is popular doesn't mean it's easy. Just ask my musicians who have to read sheet music for each song to play the songs exactly as in the original arrangement.

Life gave me the gift of meeting the singer and producer Lesny Changarrito, we made chemistry from the first moment, and with him I began to understand this very new musical language for me, but music is music and does not fight with itself. Between the two of us we achieved what for some sounds impossible: to merge two sounds that seem to be far apart.

In Rock Repa BRno two songs will sound the same to you. For example, To the roll of the bud from the beginning, it shows a sonority close to the thrash, in Out of control the Afro-Cuban vibe invades you, Rock Repa unleashes with its cumbia bass and Muévelo un poquito (Move it a little) it's a dembow full of hard-hitting guitars. I'm not going to tell you the rest for you to discover for yourselves.

I understand that repa is a proposal conceived fundamentally to be danced, as has been salsa, merengue, or our timba, however, artists such as Rubén Blades, Juan Luis Guerra, or Juan Formell, have made true chronicles and social criticism from the dance floor. Would a cast that expressly includes these themes be unheard of or does it denaturalize it?

The cast today and since its birth constitutes a social chronicle because it arises from the popular dynamics, it is not the result of music entrepreneurs seeking to create a new genre that triumphs in sales. It reflects how a sector of the population, which has also been a vital sector in the musical history of Cuba, expresses itself, lives and feels. At the time it was Amalia Batista (1936); Take chocolate, pay what you owe (El Bodeguero, 1955); You are a witch (The Witch1993); it is now Bajanda (2018), and in Rock Repa BR I include Rental and The Cowgirl that could be considered chronicles. If you want to know the history of a certain era, its popular music is the key.

How do you conceive the staging during live performances, with DJ or band?

The process doesn't end in the studio, maybe the most fun is playing it live and that part is no longer mine alone, Rock Repa BR live performance depends on a group of people who put their heart and soul into the execution of the show.

Since the beginning of my career I have been playing with a rock band: electric guitar, bass, drums. For Rock Repa BR I use the same format and all the musicians will play from start to finish what was conceived in the studio.

In my career I have had the opportunity to play on all kinds of stages, whether in front of 20 people or 50,000 and the premise is ALWAYS to deliver the best we can give, and I would not be surprised if I suddenly incorporate dancers or another element that enriches our staging, this road is just beginning and the Cuban public deserves that we give them the best.

What is your assessment of the current state of music in the world and in Cuba specifically?

I see it as always. Young people are the ones who change the times. We tend to idealize the music we prefer and especially the music that marked us, tending to say that there has never been anything better than what came before. But as when we were teenagers and we were crazy about a sound, now there are kids who listen to another one more in line with their time and their needs. It is the eternal human dilemma of resisting change, each stage has its music. What we have consumed since our youth, even what our parents, grandparents and people from other times consumed, will always be there to enjoy it again. Rock, jazz, pop, symphonic, ethnic music, everything that exists, will not cease to be produced because it is not what is most listened to at this time.

Many compare the present social and musical context in our country with the 90s, which was a very complex period but which saw, ultimately, the strengthening of our popular dance music through timba. In your case, you lived almost all that decade in Cuba, before you went to live in Spain, what similarities or differences have you detected between this and that period?

For me it's almost the same, only now I'm a different age and the kids have different tastes. In the nineties it was timba, now it's repa which is becoming the number one in popular acceptance. In the nineties Habana Abierta created rock and roll with timba, and now I started to do rock with repa, it is a similar fusion event, but twenty years later.

In 2012, when Latin sounds were already beginning to spread across almost the entire planet, you released your third album from Spain, Creating Militiawhich is surely the most metal and extreme sound of your career. If someone told you in those days that you were going to venture into a Cuban modality related to reggaeton, would you have believed it? 

I would never have imagined it. Descemer Bueno around that time, at a meal at my house in Madrid, suggested that I do Latin music but I was very into the sound of the album. Creating Militia to mutate in that way. Then came the album Return towhich is not at all similar to the previous ones because it is a debt to my singer-songwriter zone and, as I told you before, we all have our moment to evolve. Reggaeton and pachanga latina didn't get me hooked, but repa got me.

For two decades, Athanai has given Spaniards essentially rock 'n' roll. Rock Repa BR could you teach them Cuban casting as well?

I think so, it is a sound that is expanding and is liked in many Latin American countries and when Spanish people go out on Saturdays to their discos they dance to whatever they put on. Maybe soon repa will surprise us and sweep the Grammy awards as reggaeton has been doing for years.

Can you give us a preview of what you're going to sound like in 10 years?

I have no idea (laughs). I don't plan to stop making songs with Athanai's sound and now I'm banding with Rock Repa BR. Tomorrow who knows what new adventure will catch me.

To close, where can we listen Rock Repa BR?

Except Seventh Heavenof which I do not have the exploitation rights, Castro likes Rock, Creating Militia, Return to, Athanai, in Live from Bellas Artes and all the singles of Rock Repa BR you can find them on the streaming platform of your choice. For Cuba they are free on the Telegram channel. Athanai. While we're at it, I invite you to follow me on Instagram and Facebook: @athanai_oficial