The Constant Creation of Sampha
“What do I create?” asked Sampha who was in Melbourne for a special showcase. “I create things I guess, I create music, I create words, I create … thoughts. I create … everything. I create constantly. Whatever, constantly creating, everything around me is constantly in creation,” said Sampha who burst onto the electronic soul scene in 2010 with his debut Sundanza and three years later with his EP Dual, an intimate and idiosyncratic glimpse into Sampha’s artistic intent as a producer and songwriter. Now in 2016, Sampha is back again with his newest single Timmy’s Prayer from his forthcoming album Process.
Sampha was born in Morden, South London – a muse for many musicians, and Sampha not being an exception. But he says that what had the biggest affect on him was his family, like his four older brothers. “It was an eclectic upbringing when it comes to music,” he says. “All my brothers had quite different tastes, so I could just stumble across a mix tape, Stevie Wonder, The Clash, or much more, like Brazilian music.” The TV and radio was another influence for him, up until his early teens where he found other bigger influences. Eclectic is the keyword, as his sound, is nothing but. Sampha though will describe his sound as “an amalgamation of a lot of tastes” due to his eclectic mix of influences and especially the kind of music that he has been making recently – but he can’t put his finger on it.
It can be hard to pinpoint a single specific sound because he doesn’t have one – his latest release, due February 2017, Process is an entirely different being from his EP Dual, and Sampha doesn’t contest this. “I think I kept the kind of freedom of thought and that [makes music] just sound better for better or for worst. But I think just naturally that’s the way my life changes, and my experience changes, and my perception of things change and I think the document of it is the music so I really think it’s kind of a document of like where I am sometimes,” he explains.
He says that the reason he’s releasing Process as it is, is because before he just knew that he wasn’t ready to release an album and it wasn’t his intention when he started making music. “It wasn’t something I thought I was going to do any time soon but my experiences evolved and I then I started getting more exposure with SBTRKT at the time so it wasn’t like ‘oh I’m going to do this and then what I’m going to do is piggyback off that and release an album.’”
That’s not how it worked in his head. He knew that he wasn’t ready because there were a lot of things that he couldn’t yet quite grasp and understand in that environment. “Fortunately now I think I’ve got it,” he says.
Within the years that he’s released his music, his dulcet beats and innovative production caught the eye of SBTRKT, for whom Sampha co-wrote and featured vocally on his debut SBTRKT, and has been sampled and produced for Drake, Kanye, Beyoncé, and FKA twigs. The xx and Savages’ producer Rodaidh “Roddy” McDonald then came on board to co-produce Process, a different progression for Sampha who previously worked on his own music himself.
“It was a really different experience … I’ve usually self-produced, but it was a good experience. He was a great guy to work with because he wasn’t overpowering and he really helped me find my feet with finishing a record. It was a different relationship,” he says. “I learnt a lot and there’s value in stepping back and giving things time and taking in an opinion. It’s interesting to see someone else’s perspective but I had written and played most it so I think that it kind of worked better in terms of us working together.”
Sampha doesn’t work by himself for any other reason than he just feels that he needs to express himself, by himself. He describes it as having a strong feeling, vision or urge to make things, or maybe he will get a beat from someone. It’s an organic self-constructed process that he just enjoys: he enjoys production and when he feels like making things that’s what he finds himself doing, just making “weird beats” online where his focus is just to enjoy, just like singing and recording and the two, he says, keep getting closer and closer together in his mind. Although he says it was an accident. “It just wasn’t my kind of purpose. I mean when I was younger I sang in a choir at school but I didn’t really focus on that. But I did have a track on the master called Subconscious that I had a verse in there,” he recalls. “I guess the main reason people got involved in my voice was when I was collaborating with SBTRKT because initially we were just producing together and then eventually I got to record my vocals on a song called Break Off.”
Sampha is musically balanced, neither a chronic collaborator nor vehement soloist, his processes are as eclectic as his music – a union that does not seem to be failing him, and he plans to continue this successful union well into the future. After touring and his 2017 release, he plans to make more music and “visual content” (tbc! But for full disclosure, his album cover for Process was done by his friend Ben Walker who plays in some of his bands, who “picked out the face … just of the look and kind of the oddness of it of how my face looks.”).
But if anything, Sampha is a chronic creator, and he knows it. “I guess for me I’ve been given the name Sampha, but you know I’m just a ball of conscious energy taking in energy and giving out energy.”
Process is out February 2017, followed by an international tour.
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