Sketchie
Rain By High LanternThe very title of Sketchie's debut, Rain By High Lantern, casts light upon his whole project. Picture, if you can, a lantern held high on a wooden staff, its beam barely extended, groping into the darkness of some forsaken moor or down, capturing the falling brightness of the storm which rages around travellers unknown. Pilgrims perhaps, or druids.
These images are evoked by both the title and what lies inside sketchie's incredibly accomplished and perfectly flawed debut. With craftsmanlike dedication he has hewn from borrowed instruments and dead bedroom acoustics an album to soundtrack a modern medieval quest. Guitar lines grow vine-like over tumbledown walls of upright pianos and barely heard electronics. In the distance and right up close, hip hop drums cry for broken urbanity as themes wrap round themselves like wool from an infinite loom. Through the constant build and collapse of the music the noises let through silence. It is the silence you can hear in a wood, despite the chatter of birds and leaves and tree growth.
Joe Shetcliffe, the man who lives the Sketchie name, was born twenty years ago into a world of black music. His mother was a DJ on legendary pirate ship Radio Caroline, playing Afro-Caribbean and reggae records across the seas while his father loved funk, jazz and ska. From these valuable beginnings, Joe surged onwards through hip hop and into folk and rock. By 15 he was an MC and by 16 he had begun producing the pieces which would become the Mummy Fortuna's Theatre Company releases on Lex, leading to gigs with Boom Bip and Sage Francis. So far, so hip hop. Indeed his could seen as the familiar hip hop tale of prodigious talent living the maxim of beats, rhymes and life. There is, however, more to it. Lyrically closer to burroughs than Biz Markie, it is hard to imagine this self described 'happy alone', mic in hand, lording it over the crowd. He is not a confident person, he states, even as an MC, but places trust in the fact that what he has to say is more important than the bullshit of appearances, the braggadocio of hip hop. Similarly, his early productions were not based on the tried and tested practice of stolen samples but rather on fragments of soundwaves reconstructed according to mathematical rules. For Sketchie it seems, the expression 'keep it real' is not a mask concealing the raw masculinity of hip hop but rather an urgent imperative to express only that which is of yourself. In an industry where artist pr has replaced personal responsibility for artistry, Sketchie is rare in his idealism.
When we met in his Brighton home it was clear that in person, as in music, Sketchie is in a constant struggle to 'give things importance'. His sentences arrive slowly, heavily weighted by his thoughts, then gain momentum before being fast propelled into tangents on wall of sound distortion, urban foxes or the perfect cup of tea. He sleeps little and seems bothered by a restless energy giving him a vertiginous air as if he might fall off the edge of himself. As we listened to a bewildering array of music we paused over the Scandinavian jazz grooves of Placebo. As Marc Moulin's keys rode over and into the beat, Sketchie spoke of the difficulties he has making music which stays in a single groove. 'Things keep popping up' he says 'and I constantly need to move on to the next thing'. He writes in realtime with each idea triggering the next, layering line over line as he moves from instrument to instrument. Unusually for a bedroom producer his album contains no samples as in his late teens he taught himself guitar, bass, drums, piano and even a little violin. He seems entirely unphased by the challenge of learning these new things, of starting from the beginning. 'Everyone's scared of showing what they've got', he says, 'everybody has their own past and you can only work based on that. There is so much obsession with status that people are afraid to learn new things in case they're not as good as other people.' The important thing for Sketchie is to be able to funnel his emotions into music. Sometimes he just wants to take his instruments and smash them against the walls but this would fail to communicate his emotions. The listener would hear the noise but not the frustration. His album was born out of a desire to be more thoughtful than that, to give every sound importance. Despite this need to communicate with his audience Sketchie is uncomfortable with selling his music and the expectations that arise from that process. 'Right now because I've got a record deal I'm seen as a musician. Were someone to come and publish my writing would I then be a writer? Music is something that I filter my life into but it could just as easily get filtered off into writing, drawing or climbing a tree. I will never force it into music. Indeed it is perfectly feasible that I may never write another a piece of music again'. From a Jay-Z or a Timbaland this can seem an empty claim but from Sketchie it comes as a simple statement of fact. He is also after all a top computer games tester, a maker of leather shoes, an artist and a man who is happiest alone in the park amongst childhood memories of swordfights in trees.
Sketchie's unwavering commitment to expressing only himself, makes for a life of frustration in a modern world where reality is apparently revealed to us on television. His writing, some of which can be found on the sleeve of his album, rages against the fractured world man has created. 'Bring these fucking towers down to the ground / with the pound of a rifle in every mouth' he writes. This is not, he explains, a call for destruction but rather a call for remembrance of the millions trampled on to create the towers of our world and the millions who will be killed and crippled if we are to bring these towers down. 'Why', he asks 'did we bother in the first place?' Though he may appear naively idealistic, his is a knowing naivety which acknowledges its own contradictions and even its own impossibility. It is this naïve idealism which makes his quite unique music possible, which gives it its character, its flaws and its moments of beauty. Even if he never makes another piece of music again it is likely that whatever he chooses to do will be possessed of this same quality, even if it is simply climbing trees. As he says 'Humans are the first animals to have become intelligent and as a result we have nothing to live up to. Whatever we do, therefore, we must always attempt to create symphonies and not simply walls of sound'.
These images are evoked by both the title and what lies inside sketchie's incredibly accomplished and perfectly flawed debut. With craftsmanlike dedication he has hewn from borrowed instruments and dead bedroom acoustics an album to soundtrack a modern medieval quest. Guitar lines grow vine-like over tumbledown walls of upright pianos and barely heard electronics. In the distance and right up close, hip hop drums cry for broken urbanity as themes wrap round themselves like wool from an infinite loom. Through the constant build and collapse of the music the noises let through silence. It is the silence you can hear in a wood, despite the chatter of birds and leaves and tree growth.
Joe Shetcliffe, the man who lives the Sketchie name, was born twenty years ago into a world of black music. His mother was a DJ on legendary pirate ship Radio Caroline, playing Afro-Caribbean and reggae records across the seas while his father loved funk, jazz and ska. From these valuable beginnings, Joe surged onwards through hip hop and into folk and rock. By 15 he was an MC and by 16 he had begun producing the pieces which would become the Mummy Fortuna's Theatre Company releases on Lex, leading to gigs with Boom Bip and Sage Francis. So far, so hip hop. Indeed his could seen as the familiar hip hop tale of prodigious talent living the maxim of beats, rhymes and life. There is, however, more to it. Lyrically closer to burroughs than Biz Markie, it is hard to imagine this self described 'happy alone', mic in hand, lording it over the crowd. He is not a confident person, he states, even as an MC, but places trust in the fact that what he has to say is more important than the bullshit of appearances, the braggadocio of hip hop. Similarly, his early productions were not based on the tried and tested practice of stolen samples but rather on fragments of soundwaves reconstructed according to mathematical rules. For Sketchie it seems, the expression 'keep it real' is not a mask concealing the raw masculinity of hip hop but rather an urgent imperative to express only that which is of yourself. In an industry where artist pr has replaced personal responsibility for artistry, Sketchie is rare in his idealism.
When we met in his Brighton home it was clear that in person, as in music, Sketchie is in a constant struggle to 'give things importance'. His sentences arrive slowly, heavily weighted by his thoughts, then gain momentum before being fast propelled into tangents on wall of sound distortion, urban foxes or the perfect cup of tea. He sleeps little and seems bothered by a restless energy giving him a vertiginous air as if he might fall off the edge of himself. As we listened to a bewildering array of music we paused over the Scandinavian jazz grooves of Placebo. As Marc Moulin's keys rode over and into the beat, Sketchie spoke of the difficulties he has making music which stays in a single groove. 'Things keep popping up' he says 'and I constantly need to move on to the next thing'. He writes in realtime with each idea triggering the next, layering line over line as he moves from instrument to instrument. Unusually for a bedroom producer his album contains no samples as in his late teens he taught himself guitar, bass, drums, piano and even a little violin. He seems entirely unphased by the challenge of learning these new things, of starting from the beginning. 'Everyone's scared of showing what they've got', he says, 'everybody has their own past and you can only work based on that. There is so much obsession with status that people are afraid to learn new things in case they're not as good as other people.' The important thing for Sketchie is to be able to funnel his emotions into music. Sometimes he just wants to take his instruments and smash them against the walls but this would fail to communicate his emotions. The listener would hear the noise but not the frustration. His album was born out of a desire to be more thoughtful than that, to give every sound importance. Despite this need to communicate with his audience Sketchie is uncomfortable with selling his music and the expectations that arise from that process. 'Right now because I've got a record deal I'm seen as a musician. Were someone to come and publish my writing would I then be a writer? Music is something that I filter my life into but it could just as easily get filtered off into writing, drawing or climbing a tree. I will never force it into music. Indeed it is perfectly feasible that I may never write another a piece of music again'. From a Jay-Z or a Timbaland this can seem an empty claim but from Sketchie it comes as a simple statement of fact. He is also after all a top computer games tester, a maker of leather shoes, an artist and a man who is happiest alone in the park amongst childhood memories of swordfights in trees.
Sketchie's unwavering commitment to expressing only himself, makes for a life of frustration in a modern world where reality is apparently revealed to us on television. His writing, some of which can be found on the sleeve of his album, rages against the fractured world man has created. 'Bring these fucking towers down to the ground / with the pound of a rifle in every mouth' he writes. This is not, he explains, a call for destruction but rather a call for remembrance of the millions trampled on to create the towers of our world and the millions who will be killed and crippled if we are to bring these towers down. 'Why', he asks 'did we bother in the first place?' Though he may appear naively idealistic, his is a knowing naivety which acknowledges its own contradictions and even its own impossibility. It is this naïve idealism which makes his quite unique music possible, which gives it its character, its flaws and its moments of beauty. Even if he never makes another piece of music again it is likely that whatever he chooses to do will be possessed of this same quality, even if it is simply climbing trees. As he says 'Humans are the first animals to have become intelligent and as a result we have nothing to live up to. Whatever we do, therefore, we must always attempt to create symphonies and not simply walls of sound'.
