Wu Tang Clan’s RZA has released a collaborative album with System Of A Down bassist Shavo Odadjian, reports.
The duo had first announced their project Achozen (pronounced “a chosen”) in the mid-2000s, around when the bassist was hyping an ill-fated online music community called urSession. But other than the release a few tracks (“Deuces,” “Salute/Sacrifice”), the group seemed to fall by the wayside. Now eight tracks of the act’s spacey, lushly textured hip-hop are available with the purchase of a limited-edition portable speaker, the Boombotix Boombot Pro.
“We both come from struggle. We come from oppression. I didn’t know Armenia was the first country to accept Christianity as its national religion. And I didn’t know about the Armenian genocide. I knew about the black man’s struggle in America from slavery to civil rights to whatever we still go through, but you think that that struggle is just personal. You don’t realize, “Oh, wow, the Asian brothers went through a struggle. The Armenian brothers went through a struggle. Now the Pakistani and the brothers in the Middle East is going through a lot of struggle based on situations.” Right? So, I became aware and that helped connect us,” RZA told the Rolling Stone.
“That led to our second song, which is called “Fabricated Lies” and is about the Armenian genocide. He gave me a couple of books as well, but I was moved by the struggle enough that I wrote a verse,” he said.
Speaking about the first-ever concert of the System of A Down in Armenia on the ove of the 100th anniversray of the Armenian Genocide, Shavo Odadjian said: “We played two-and-a-half hours, 37 songs. We played outside to 100,000 people; there was not spot for people to even pit. It was pouring rain, lightning going on. I cried onstage a few times. It was emotional to think that I was that age, that they were like little me’s, my little kids. And we’re in our country, but it’s their country because they live there and we are giving them what they’ve only see on the internet, live. From grandparents to three-year-olds were there, standing in the rain watching this crazy band. But it was just amazing and I don’t think that it can ever be duplicated unless it was a 200th anniversary. It was perfect. Everything perfectly fell into place.”