{"id":68898,"date":"2023-10-19T18:39:19","date_gmt":"2023-10-19T18:39:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/likecelebwn.com\/?p=68898"},"modified":"2023-10-19T18:39:19","modified_gmt":"2023-10-19T18:39:19","slug":"called-on-by-beyonce-and-drake-his-unmistakable-voice-now-takes-centre-stage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/likecelebwn.com\/lifestyle\/called-on-by-beyonce-and-drake-his-unmistakable-voice-now-takes-centre-stage\/","title":{"rendered":"Called on by Beyonce and Drake, his unmistakable voice now takes centre stage"},"content":{"rendered":"

By <\/span>Nick Buckley<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Save articles for later<\/h3>\n

Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.<\/p>\n

While freestyling in the studio in 2019, a freefalling bird dived into Sampha Sisay\u2019s imagination. It sparked childhood memories of his older brother reading to him from Disney picture books. But one evening, his brother opened something stranger: Richard Bach\u2019s Jonathan Livingston Seagull<\/i> \u2013 an allegorical fable about a bird whose obsession with flight carries him to new planes of existence.<\/p>\n

\u201c[As a child] I didn\u2019t really have a good idea of the parallels to spirituality that Jonathan was going through, of self discovery and in some way, self mastery,\u201d says the London-born musician. That freestyle became Spirit 2.0<\/em>, the first track to make it onto Sisay\u2019s new album Lahai<\/i>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Sampha, now 34, has followed up his Mercury Prize-winning debut Process (2017) with the remarkable Lahai.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Jesse Crankston<\/cite><\/p>\n

Arriving six years after Process<\/i> (his acclaimed Mercury Prize-winning debut), Lahai <\/i>syphons Sisay\u2019s spiritual yearning as he grieves his mother\u2019s death, becomes a father and contemplates a metaphysical, intergenerational timeline. Lahai <\/i>is a soul-affirming landmark of contemporary R&B.<\/p>\n

While composing Spirit 2.0<\/em>, Sisay wandered London\u2019s heaths with the track\u2019s bones playing in his headphones, then just a few chords and modular synth lines. His attention was drawn to the unusually clear skies overhead, where he imagined viewing the world from above. Thematic currents of flight, weightlessness, elevation, non-linearity and transcendence flow out across Lahai.<\/i><\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes I need a bird\u2019s eye view\u2026 as opposed to looking left and right. I can be a bit claustrophobic and lose my sense of space and time, maybe get a bit numb because I don\u2019t know how I\u2019ve arrived [at a destination],\u201d says Sisay. \u201cFlying, seeing that view, can reconnect you to where you are.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sisay\u2019s parents migrated to the UK from Sierra Leone and he describes how navigating his own cultural hybridity through today\u2019s social, legal, financial and technological systems can overwhelm him.<\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes you can get caught up in the pattern, become detached \u2013 especially in this day and age. We have these bodies that are millions of years old in terms of technology but we\u2019re in a new software of time and space,\u201d says Sisay, one of several elliptical answers in our conversation.<\/p>\n

On Suspended<\/em>, his urgent, anxious vocals are fragmented into a digital stutter, as though technology is tearing his soul asunder. He\u2019s interested in interrogating the assumption that the march of technological progress requires disregarding older ways of living.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Lahai builds on a lineage of psychedelic soul and UK electronic music.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cRespecting people who might live in the forest, for instance, how complicated that [life] must be. I look out at nature and that tree might have some crazy medicinal properties that I\u2019m surrounded by and don\u2019t even question. What am I putting into my body? Is this really progress? Maybe I need to look back\u2026\u201d says Sisay, trailing off wistfully.<\/p>\n

Faced with alienating technology and Western historical narratives, Sisay has found cultural connection through the West African Wassoulou folk music practised in Sierra Leone and its neighbouring countries. Finding a CD in his dad\u2019s collection by the Grammy Award-winning Malian musician Oumou Sangar\u00e9 sent Sisay down a rabbit hole of research challenging Western hierarchies that place orchestras at the apex of compositional complexity.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome people say the further you go back in particular types of music the more complexity you can see and, in that case, the more futuristic it gets. Some genres of music don\u2019t move in a linear fashion. In some African music there\u2019s polyphony that just keeps getting built upon and goes up, as opposed to going from side to side,\u201d says Sisay. He says that deepening his knowledge of Wassoulou traditions helped kickstart the album\u2019s writing process and can be felt most strongly in the modular synth patterns on Spirit 2.0<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Lahai<\/i> comfortably sits in the canon of pop music, but it does so mercurially, blurring the delineations between verse, chorus, bridge and refrain. Its tracks build on an evolutionary lineage of psychedelic soul music and UK electronic music.<\/p>\n

Evidence<\/em> plays like a big-hearted Stevie Wonder love-up and the trippiness of Alice Coltrane\u2019s astral jazz is woven across the album. Only<\/em> shares a sweeping opening note with MJ Cole\u2019s UK garage classic Sincere<\/em> and complex jazz-meets-drum-and-bass breakbeats skitter on Can\u2019t Go Back<\/em>. His beloved piano is never far from reach.<\/p>\n

Sisay\u2019s own lineage is right there in the title: Lahai is Sisay\u2019s middle name and his paternal grandfather\u2019s name before him. Sisay says he struggles to maintain cultural bonds at times, but since the album\u2019s announcement, relatives have reconnected to share stories about his grandfather.<\/p>\n

\u2018I feel like I\u2019m living with things my mother went through. My mum was shy and maybe scared of things, a little gentle and sensitive.\u2019<\/p>\n

Both Process<\/i> and Lahai <\/i>examine deep familial bonds. After rising to prominence at age 24 on SBTRKT\u2019s 2012 single Hold On<\/em>, Sisay\u2019s strikingly vulnerable voice was in hot demand by megastars including Beyonc\u00e9, Solange, Drake and Kanye West. But in late 2014 he was called back to his South London hometown of Morden to care for his mother, who would die of cancer the following year, a decade after his father died of the same disease.<\/p>\n

His 2017 album Process<\/i> was written in part to process that loss. But grief doesn\u2019t end with the conclusion of an album cycle. The inherited trauma left Sisay emotionally paralysed and pathologising illness.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not just passing away, but also the thought of how<\/i> someone passes away, the pain they go through and the unfairness of it all\u2026 it\u2019s such a physical feeling. Fears that you might have associated with death, or having a personal health problem\u2026 are in some ways stored in my body now, in my memory,\u201d says Sisay who, as an adult orphan, has found himself considering how he embodies his parents.<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel like I\u2019m living with things my mother went through. My mum was shy and maybe scared of things, a little gentle and sensitive. Dad had a bit more oomph to him. There\u2019s times where you\u2019re wondering \u2018where did I get this from?\u2018. You\u2019re trying to relocate the genesis of certain personality traits,\u201d says Sisay, whose curiosity about epigenetics now extends to the next generation.<\/p>\n

In 2020, Sisay became a father when his daughter was born during the making of Lahai<\/i>. The album places multiple generations of Sisay\u2019s family in a time continuum in which their stories, memories and lives overlap.<\/p>\n

\u201cWithout memory time doesn\u2019t really exist, but also you can look into the past, reimagine it or find a different story… time changes in conjunction with mass and speed. There are different nows, we live in a pool of now, but the same now doesn\u2019t exist across the whole universe. Time works differently somewhere else,\u201d says Sisay.<\/p>\n

He ruminates on the idea on the brief, crystalline track Satellite Business<\/em>. \u201cThrough the eyes of my child I can see an inner vision\/ through the eyes of my child I can see you in my vision\/ Thinking maybe there\u2019s no ends, maybe just infinity\/ maybe no beginnings, maybe just bridges,\u201d he sings.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat lyric came from looking at my child and then feeling my mum\u2019s energy,\u201d says Sisay. \u201cNot having access to a long family history line, not meeting my grandparents, there\u2019s this filling in of the lines or imagination that comes into things and I dream up ideas.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sisay\u2019s imagination blooms, takes shape and dissolves mid-sentence. Trying to follow his thoughts can feel like grasping at clouds \u2013 voluminous concepts dissolve into one another before you can fully comprehend their shape. He hopes some of his recorded thoughts or creations will help his daughter embark on her own time-travelling adventure when she\u2019s ready.<\/p>\n

\u201c[It\u2019s nice] thinking about the future, when she\u2019s on her path of self-discovery, that my music, or these interviews, will give her a little bit of something. There\u2019s quite a lot of information \u2013 I don\u2019t have this about my parents. There\u2019s a lot about yourself that you really want to know and want to know about your parents when they\u2019re gone,\u201d says Sisay.<\/p>\n

Once tasked with the responsibility of easing a parent into death, Sisay is now learning to be a different kind of carer, one who guides a child into life. Like Jonathan the seagull, Sisay\u2019s obsession with his craft has seen his artistry soar into a new realm on Lahai<\/i> And through his daughter he has found a connection to the family members he thought were gone forever.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe thing about gaining something is it naturally makes you feel what you\u2019ve lost,\u201d says Sisay. \u201cHaving a child and feeling my mother\u2019s energy or elegance, or just the way [my daughter] looks and then recognising myself \u2013 that was quite a powerful thing, seeing myself in this continuum. Through my daughter, I felt a glimpse into a wider connection.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sampha\u2019s Lahai<\/em> is out on October 20.<\/strong><\/p>\n

To read more from<\/b> Spectrum<\/i><\/b>, visit our page here<\/b><\/p>\n

Most Viewed in Culture<\/h2>\n

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By Nick Buckley Save articles for later Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. While freestyling in the studio in 2019, a freefalling bird dived into Sampha Sisay\u2019s imagination. It sparked childhood memories of his older brother reading to him from Disney picture books. 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