Gaika Tavares aka Gaika produces what he calls high-brow rap—soundtrack music that articulates black identity. Through conceptual releases like Machine [self-released, 2015] and Security [Mixpak, 2016], he draws on his West-Indian roots to intellectualize Caribbean music styles and fuse them with UK-centric sounds that demonstrate the narrative that has defined the black movement.

For Gaika, the UK’s sound-system culture is what unifies an otherwise divided nation—he understands sound systems as a tool for communities to rise above imposed silence. This fascination with sound-system culture has driven Gaika to initiate a discourse about race, class, and cultural appropriation as well as the gentrification of Notting Hill Carnival amidst the Windrush scandal, which prompted him to realize the System installation and event series at Somerset House in 2018.

Basic Volume (Warp Records, 2018) is Gaika’s latest release. It’s a discussion with his father who recently passed away. It takes place somewhere above the earth. During the two years that he dedicated himself to the project, the artist—who has several musical projects in the pipeline, including a sequel to Security on the Mexico-based record label N.A.A.F.I.—reflected intensely upon what it means to be an immigrant in Britain: an immigrant in Britain, navigating the inner city, an immigrant battling the system and ever-present institutionalized racism that accompanies it. “We’re all British together, right? But we’re not,” he tells Claire Mouchemore, who interviewed Gaika at the occasion of his gig at Zurich’s Exil club in late 2018.

Claire Mouchemore You grew up in South London. What does South London sound like? Can you describe growing up in that sort of environment and what your first interactions with sound and music were?

Gaika Tavares I was always surrounded by music. Jungle, garage, grime, dancehall—there was always something happening. Whether it was coming out of a car or someone throwing a party. I guess I never really considered how lucky I was. Some people are into football, we were always into music. There were legendary record shops just down the road and we’d go down, buy a record, put it on and straight away it would transport us. I was around a lot of things that became really popular. I saw London become the center of music. When you live there you don’t think about living in the center of all this culture. Culture was always in your face. It wasn’t something that you viewed from a distance. It was next door. It was in your house. You were making it with your friends and you always felt like you could.

CM And after some time it occurred to you that you wanted to start making music for yourself?

GT I started making music in my young teenage years. I experimented with tape players and keyboards and very quickly I realized that what I was making didn’t sound like what was hot at the time. I thought, “ok everyone wants to be an MC and I’m not capable of that, so let me just be the person that puts the event on.” In the back of my mind, I unconsciously wondered why I was so fixated on music. I made a living around music culture, but not as an artist, yet secretly I wanted to be one. Years later I put my fear aside and decided to properly give music a go. It’s what I should have done in the first place, I was just too afraid. One day an opportunity presented itself and I ran with it—I was asked to be in this band because I had this certain stage presence and aesthetic. If I do something, I want to be good at it and I’ll do it until I am eventually good at it. Especially at that point in my life, I was obsessive, relentless. Working on things over and over and over again—trying to be better and learn how to do things properly. I was already accomplished in other areas, so there wasn’t that pressure of “if this doesn’t work I can’t do something else.” I found that to be quite liberating—if I take risks, it’s because I don’t live in the result of the work.

CM Before finding your sound, did you experiment with different styles?

GT I made all kinds of weird music.

CM And what was the initial starting point?

GT The music always had a similar aesthetic, but I was more focused on making grime records—punk grime and almost like beatdown hardcore music with live drums. I made a lot of techno and ambient music too. It was always more electronically oriented. In the end, I realized I can only make what’s in my head and be true to everything that I am rather than being in this band.

The conversation about mixing genres becomes tedious because I don’t really hear music in terms of genre. I don’t consume it in that way. I can hear the tempo and the key and the feeling, that’s really all I can hear. I can’t tell you how dancehall is supposed to sound—something that sounds like dancehall to me doesn’t necessarily sound like dancehall to others. I look at music really just by what genres are doing, and that’s how I quantify it. The rest of it doesn’t really matter.

CM How would you define your current style of music? Because I can define it for myself, but I’m sure for you, the creator, it presents as something completely different—just like the dancehall example you gave.

GT The music I love. I wouldn’t go further than that. Soundtrack music. That’s about it. It can change, but people always know when I’ve made something. Somedays I think of it as vocoder processing, T-Pain or Herbie Hancock. Sometimes I think of it in terms of electronic music, Tim Hecker, Aphex Twin, and this avant-garde sort of music. Other times I think of it as this dark dancehall or rap or trap. Those are all things I’m into. Then there are times when I think I’m just making Nine Inch Nails, but black.

CM You’ve just released Basic Volume, a record that mirrors your experiences with migration in the UK, among other, more personal subjects. What’s the response been like?

GT I live in a bit of a bubble, I try not to live in the effect of the music. I don’t really hang out where I think they play my music or around hype—so it’s difficult for me to gauge. But I feel like it seems to have gone well. I’m touring a lot. My phone is ringing. My main thing is I don’t make music for the effect, I make it because of how it makes me feel.

CM What was happening in your life during the time you were working on the record?

GT My father had died just before I started it. So, I was traveling a lot and grieving a lot. Writing the truth. I was having many affairs. I was in constant motion. Constant turmoil. Trying to make something that I thought was a classic and would be forever. I made concept records in the past, but I didn’t want Basic Volume to be a high-concept record. I wanted it to be true to me. So in order to do that, I was trying to work out what being true to me meant exactly.

CM I read that an obvious influence for the record was the current wavering political climate in the UK. How is it living amongst that right now?

GT I felt like it was necessary to tell the truth as I saw it. What it meant to be me, what it meant to be an immigrant—to come from an immigrant family and to be living in Britain. I wanted to make it about our lives and really tell the truth. I realized how much of that is driven by being an immigrant. How much our experience is driven by our parents. It wasn’t the same for us as it was for everyone else—we had to strive to be excellent. We had to work three times as hard and at the same time dodge all the things that the inner city is. It’s not an easy ride. There’s pressure from every side.

Our parents might have been the most talented and the ablest, and whether they came from a rich or poor background is irrelevant—they all arrived in a place which tried to keep them down. As I was making the record, it naturally became about the struggle of migration. Politically all these things were happening before my very eyes and I just realized I had to do this—even if it was hard to talk about. There’s this normalization that happens, we’re all British together right? But we’re not, we’re not at all. And that’s not going to change until we stop and think about it, and consider what being British actually means.

CM What does the record illustrate about your experiences with systems of migration?

GT When the record came out, people labeled it as a sign of the times and it finally felt real. I wanted to talk about how it feels to be me, in Britain, today—in a layered way. It’s a fundamentally underexplored thing, I don’t care about completely constructed borders. Why would they apply to me and why would I care about them? The question was more: where am I from and what does that mean? I found myself traveling all the time, and everywhere I would go I would see the same thing. No matter what country it was: anti-blackness and gentrification. No matter what language or what country. I feel like I had this overview of the world that I wanted to share. I envisaged the record to be this communication with my father—a discussion above the earth. That’s why the political situation worldwide informed the record. At this time, I saw so many artists singing about all this surface-level stuff and it felt so calculated and fake. It felt empty. I didn’t want to make a preachy record, and I didn’t want to make something lyrically directional. I wanted to make commentary in a particular context.

CM It can be difficult to work politics into music, especially when lyricism is involved. How did you go about avoiding coming off as politically direct, yet still have such weighted political meaning shine through on each track?

GT I just told the truth about my life. There’s a difference between making art that’s challenging and has a real-world aspect, and making a record about your own political power that references specific politicians and issues. For me, that’s not timeless and it misses the point completely. This is how I think and how people like me think. I took this route, rather than making it about a battle between individual politicians and myself. That’s just about power, on both sides.

I wrote Basic Volume to be more axiomatic than that—with more underneath, before you get to the quality, you question what you believe. I like poetry more than I like descriptive lyrics or storytelling. I know what I’m talking about and that’s what matters. The people that know me understand what the tracks are about. A lot of the tracks I write are letters to real people. Everything I say is true and real, and in some sense you don’t want to air things out so obviously—so writing in this way for me cancels out that possibility of the music becoming preachy. I make music about real people and real things, not abstract things. I don’t separate people’s lives from the space in which they live in, because I find that to be forced.

CM Basic Volume is your most personal release to date. Did you hit any blocks when figuring out how to communicate your grief and experience through the album?

GT No.

CM When you had finished, did you have any hesitations about releasing it?

GT Definitely. Many hesitations. As I say, a lot of things on there are super personal. There are things on there that are about my family. Of course, I had hesitations, but I’m not a liar. It was just fear of being judged, and the whole point of me making music was to leave that fear behind. I left those hesitations behind quite quickly.

I went mental before I put the record out. I worked on it so much, it was like sanding away, chipping away at something, and finally reaching a result that I was satisfied with. It wasn’t a project where I couldn’t see the light halfway through or I doubted its credibility, but there were points where I knew I had to make it better than it was at that point in time.

In music, you’re constantly reliving the trauma that is poured into those records. So by the end of it, I started to panic. When I embarked on the process of making a record that is named after something that was such an integral part of my life and is no longer there—my father’s company—I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. I knew it wasn’t going to be the same as Machine or Security which have been these kind of conceptual art records. This was about the core of my being and I knew that was going to be difficult. I was ready for it.

CM As you said, Basic Volume is a completely different record compared to Machine and Security. Did you approach it differently process-wise?

GT Not really, we just focused on songs and less on soundscapes and rap and making the sounds weird and conceptual. I focused on writing short songs, rather than meandering ones. I wanted it to be true to what is in the DNA of the record. I wanted to make something that my dad would have liked. He would have been like, “yeah I listened to Machine and it’s clever, but why are the tracks 6 minutes long?” Melody was a big focus, too. I grew in confidence as a singer and so I wanted to be able to finally explore that a bit more.

It was the same process, but it’s kind of like the results of an experiment. If you look at Machine as an experiment and Security as a different experiment, Basic Volume was the result of those two things—all the things that we learned through making those records. All the processes and techniques that we’d learned from that and years of touring, put into the recording process. We honed in on things. The sound and the process matured.

CM Your work has a very obvious visual focus that clearly prioritizes certain aesthetics. Where do you find influence for your artistry outside of music?

GT In weird films on television late at night. I get fixated on visual things. Right now, I’m obsessed with home shopping on TV. I sit at home and I watch it over and over again, and it really fascinates me. I don’t know why, but I’m really into it. I just know that at some point I’ll make a project that will have something to do with this.

I’m fascinated by a moving image or a representation of reality. There’s not one place where I channel that inspiration. There are certain directors where I feel that my music really fits in with their bodies of work in my head: Ridley Scott and David Lynch especially. The art I make is a representation of my innocent self, absorbing things and how they make me feel. Creating and recording what was triggered in my imagination. I guess that’s why my music always has this late-80s, early-90s vibe. Because all that stuff is burned into my memory—not music from the era, but film. And the soundtracks of those films, mixed in with everything that came later on Clubland and Button Records. If I’m influenced by anything, then it’s the feeling that era of cinema gave to me and how that informed the next period of my life.

CM Do you take those visuals elements and implant them into your performances as well?

GT In terms of those visual elements, it’s not direct. I don’t try to recreate those things—it’s more the feeling and the memory of it. It’s subconscious, so when I look back I ask myself: where did that come from and what does it remind me of?

I realized, if I’m influenced by any performers, then it’s the performers of that era of the late 80s and early 90s: Prince, Michael Jackson, Freddie Mercury. That’s why I perform—when I was a child, I saw those artists doing that on TV and thought that’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re on stage. I always want there to be a “show.”

CM In August of 2018, during the Notting Hill Carnival, you collaborated with Boiler Room on System—an installation and wider event series that took over London’s Somerset House and presented audiences with a discourse that explored the 70 years passed since the Windrush migration and, more broadly, took a close look at the UK’s iconic sound-system culture and its direct links to migration. Can you explain the idea of the installation and how it was put into practice?

GT When Boiler Room approached me I was in the middle of making Basic Volume and I wanted to make it connect with some of the themes in the album. One of those themes was sound-system culture and our connections to technology. I grew up in a very technical environment around sound systems and from an early age, I was experimenting with the possibilities of sound. I looked at the cultural, technological and political aspects of this theme and tried to make something that combined all of them. But it was a major public work so I wanted it to be functional and of a larger size.

It ended up being a big frame with screens all the way round which was dressed as if it was a jungle and inside that was a sound system. The screens showed visuals that were a combination of images from a film that I made that had been a part of the album writing process. It was all about what it means to be in this system, what it means to be a black person, an immigrant, living in Britain today. Especially in terms of the Carnival and the negative connotations that surround it. During Carnival, there is a feeling of unrest, yet this place is so full of love—it’s the surveillance that makes you feel like that distress.

The installation was made up of all these elements that represent a sense of monitoring—the sound system included cameras, using projection-mapping that was reactive to the music to show this ever-changing live video feed. And obviously the sound system is in a big room, so we had to have a party—which we did. It was insane. For London, during that period of time, that was one of the best things to happen in a long time. People really understood what we were trying to do. They came in numbers and they danced. It was a real mix of everyone.

CM What was the choice behind the venue, Somerset House—a Neo-classical building that overlooks the River Thames in London and was built in 1796?

GT Somerset House is a palace and we had the floors bending. The health and safety guy was in the front with a drink in his hand. The door staff were happy to see some different people in that space. To this day, that place is paid for by the taxpayer and built off the backs of immigrants. You can’t tell me that I can’t throw a party in there if I want to. I’m going to and anybody that wants to go can come. That’s the point I was trying to make, which I felt was similar to my parents and grandparents’ generations. Instead of running away from Teddy Boys with flip knives, they stood and put sound systems in the streets and said we’re not going anywhere. We’re not going anywhere. We’re going to dance in your face in fact, that’s what we’re gonna do. And they did. And they won that battle. To me, that’s what a sound system is.