There’s a word that comes up a lot when the Milwaukee live rap duo Bo & Airo discuss their origins: serendipity. The two chalk up the project’s existence to the sheer coincidence of their names. Drummer Will Rose had been making rap music under the moniker Airo Kwil, while bassist Bo Triplex had been leading the funk group Bo Triplex and His Beautiful Band. “I had the epiphany that I was going as Airo and there was another artist in the city named Bo, and it was sort of a ‘holy shit’ moment,” Rose recalls. “I texted Bo and he agreed it was hilarious, so we got together and started making music.”
A pun alone is a pretty flimsy foundation for a band, but the two’s backgrounds proved complementary. “It just so happened that we both had a lot of common interests,” Rose says. “One of us was a bassist and a vocalist, and the other of us was a drummer and a bassist, so it was pretty easy to make a duo out of that.”
Even before their first sessions together, Triplex had an idea of how he wanted the duo to sound. “I wanted to make it just be hard as fuck,” he says. “I wanted to make some hard music, where the bass hits hard, the drums hit hard, and everything we say is just gnarly and we just rip it. I wanted it to be aggressive. Some of Airo’s previous projects are very eloquent, and he played more with the words and referenced a lot of different authors and soundscapes and things like that. With this stuff, though, I wanted to make it straight-to-the-point rap; rap for the sake of rap.”
The two-man live setup also gave Triplex the outlet to play bass and rap at the same time, something he’d long wanted to push himself to try. For his part, Rose had some experience rapping and drumming before, but nothing along the lines of the frantic, full-kit approach he adopted with Bo & Airo.
“While performing as Airo Kwil, I’d done some more minimal percussion stuff in addition to doing production,” he says. “A lot of times I would have one floor tom and I’d be doing vocals while carrying the beats with that. But for this project up, I’ve really honed in on putting vocals over the drum kit exclusively, in a way that I hadn’t been pushed to do before.”
There’s an indisputable wow factor to seeing two musicians trade rap verses while sweating over their instruments on stage, and on the duo’s debut EP, I, they succeed in the tough task of capturing the impact and intensity of Bo & Airo’s live sets. Recorded with Dan Frankel at Beathouse Studios and Josh Evert at Silver City Studios, it’s five songs of the kind of bratty, bruising, wild-out hip-hop you don’t hear too much these days—imagine Run The Jewels if that duo retooled their act for basement punk shows.
Their music is a throwback in a sense, Triplex says. “A lot of contemporary rap wants to wake you up and tell you about the world,” he explains, “whereas there’s this older stuff that’s just about yelling at you, or telling off your parents. It was a way to get back at somebody! That’s the genre of music that we want to make.”
Bo & Airo will play an album release show Friday, Sept. 29, at Company Brewing, 735 E. Center St., with openers Rusty Pelicans and Faux Fiction. There will also be improv comedy from Mojo Dojo Comedy and a set of improvised music from Bo & Airo’s open-mic side project, the Boom Bap and Taps All Stars. “Improvisation is going to be our theme throughout the night,” Rose says.
