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Shakka : Get Familiar

Tajha Myer-Ferreira January 30, 2012 featuredbanner, Get Familiar, Music 2 Comments

Find him in his place of Zen, down at his studio in Westbourne Grove in the Tabernacle perfecting his “exquisite pieces of art.” West London’s very own Thomas Crown, quirky singer, songwriter and producer Shakka is ready to take on the UK scene with something more than unique.

“If you think inside of the box to realise that you inside yourself are a different entity from birth, there’s no one else like you to begin with from the moment you go out into the world,” he says of his inside-the-box approach. Musically, “I tried to find out more about myself and more about where I came from and what caused people more to gravitate towards that style, and mix it into other things with other different styles.”

Fusing Hip Hop and R&B with Reggae, Rock, Dance, Garage, Grime and “whatever sounds good, to make something beautiful,” Shakka draws influence from the likes of the eclectic Andre 3000 to the commercial birther of reggae Bob Marley, whom he listened to when younger in the studio with his Dad, a member to a reggae band called the Foreigners Crew.

His recent mixtape The Shakka Crown Affair was modelled from the story of the bored business billionaire Thomas Crown, who found enjoyment in stealing fine art from museums that he gravitated towards, and follows the journey of Shakka stealing music from his own fictional art gallery to creating his own; “It exhibits how I grow from just doing remixes to start making my own sound in the end.”

More than just a storyteller through his songwriting skills but also a producer, singer and rapper, mirroring his very own icons like Andre 3000 and Labrinth, Shakka revels in the perks of being in control of his own creativity. With a twist to the ordinary acapella, he and creative crew House of ALT have a series of “Shakkapellas” – “covers that I’ve produced myself and beat boxed entirely using my mouth” – so far recreating Beyoncé’s “End Of Time” and Frank Ocean’s “Thinking Of You.”

But what’s next for this creative soul?

“It’s one of them ones there where it is fresh, it hasn’t been touched but it also relates to the community and the scene that I am birthed in,” he says, believing it’s time to also bring in some of the other sounds he grew up listening to in the early noughties, such as the birthers of Grime, Wiley, Dizzee Rascal, Kano to as early as the So Solid Crew. “I did very very briefly with ‘Spaceship’ and ‘God Put a Smile On Your Face’ but I definitely could’ve touched upon that a little bit more,” he says. “A bit more spitting and a bit more greeeze.”