NEW BALANCE 475 PRESENTED BY UrlfreezeShops: The Emotional Solace of cktrl

From his critically-acclaimed EP Robyn, a collection of breathtakingly moving, intricately constructed tracks reflecting on the loss of love, to Yield, a stunning demonstration of raw instrumentation and orchestration, cktrl’s body of work is reflective of an artist sitting at the razor’s-edge of musical creativity. In light of that, UrlfreezeShops caught up with the renowned creative force to celebrate the launch of the New Balance 475 Presented by UrlfreezeShops, sitting down to discuss vulnerability, musical curiosity and the importance of collaboration.

There’s often a sense of vulnerability and emotion to your music, where you delve deep into feelings like heartbreak head first. Why is conveying this sense of emotion and vulnerability key to your creative process?

It’s a good question. It’s not really that considered, if I’m honest. It’s more to do with just being honest, that’s the key thing to my creative process. I just do what I feel, when I feel and how I feel to do it. So if I have been going through something, that will definitely come out in the music — it’s like a reflection, or a snapshot, of those different times in my life, or when I think about those different times in my life. Like a lot of times with the process, it’s either I’ve been going through something or I’m looking back on things. That’s kind of always been the way I’ve approached making music.

Similarly, you’ve previously described your music as guided meditations. Can you touch upon this idea and what you’re aiming to elicit from listeners?

With the guided meditation thing, that kind of came from people listening and how the music has impacted them from where they’re at. For me, I always find the music quite grounding for myself. As I was saying in the last question, the music comes about from helping me to get through things, so if it can help others, then that’s amazing. But initially, the process is to just help myself with what I’m dealing with. But being able to share the music and share these emotions has been an amazing blessing. I don’t really talk at shows, but afterwards, I’ll go to speak with people directly, and a lot of people will open up about what they’ve been going through, or a shift in their life and how the music has helped them get through it. That’s been quite rewarding.

Your music is sprawling and experimental, nodding to different genres like classical, avant-garde jazz and electronica, though in a way that’s reinventive and uniquely your own. Why is this idea of reinventing classics important to you?

I wouldn’t say that it is, I guess, to be really honest. With me personally, I just don’t believe in rehashing things. Growing up where I have done, and being where I’m from as well, it’s like you have to be original. You can’t copy no one else’s ting or it isn’t going to fly. I think I’ve always took pride on being original still, so that’s where it comes from. I guess that’s why with articles or interviews, people talk about reimagining or reinventing because things that are traditionally classical are traditionally white. So when I’m doing that, and I have that kind of instrumentation, it’s like “Hey buddy, what’s he up to over there?”. But this music is always, and has always been, ours. Originality and authenticity come from the source first.

Throughout your career, you’ve collaborated with a myriad of different esteemed creatives, including Duval Timothy, Mereba and Campbell Addy, to name just a snapshot. Why is collaboration important to your creativity? What is it you look for when working with collaborative partners?  

Collaboration is kind of everything. It always comes back to community and a tribal mentality, which is kind of innate in everyone’s being from the beginning of time, like the saying it takes village to raise a child. I’m also a family man, fully, so when it comes to my art, it isn’t really any different. We’ve always had a creative family and that’s forever expanding. Those people you mentioned there, that snapshot, they are people I’ve known for a long time, or I’ve met along the way through travelling and there’s a kinship through our gifts. I guess what I look for when working with collaborative partners more of the time is friendship. I don’t really work with people who I don’t know that well, or we haven’t had some kind of vibe from before. Everything’s just got to be natural.

Your work has also translated over into the worlds of fashion, having worked with Dior, Off-White and, now, UrlfreezeShops and New Balance. Has fashion always been a space you wanted to move into with your music, or did this come about organically?

Again, yeah, everything occurred naturally. With the global community and through travelling, you meet different people and you form your own community. That’s how it’s always been, with people finding each other from Tumblr and Instagram. When you travel to those places and you meet friends you’ve connected with and meet friends of friends. So coming up in music and fashion at the same time was inevitable for me, as I’ve got friends across both. It’s heavily ingrained in the visual identity of my projects and how they come to life — for example, with all of the artworks I’ve done so far. Again, with New Balance in particular, I’ve worked with them a few times over the years. The first time I worked with them was back in 2016. I was DJing them times, and we did a world tour around Seoul, Berlin and LA. I worked with them again in 2021 for my Crack magazine cover, as well as being in the campaign for the Grey Day ting. It’s good to go full circle with them with this project.  

Music has been something that’s been a big part of your life from a young age, from your classical training in your earlier years moving through to DJing and now being a multi-instrumentalist, producer and composer. Where did this curiosity for musical exploration come from for you?

I have to say it would probably be the first two records I got from my dad. He gave me two CDs, Bob Marley’s Survival and Michael Jackson’s Black or White. I remember hearing those over and over again, and thinking “how do I make something that’s in between these two things?”. Instruments came later in the sense, but even though I started playing instruments before producing, they were very separate. Being taught classically, it’s kind of like another lesson at school, like maths or something. It was more of something separate, and I didn’t start mixing the instrumentation and production until around 12 years later. So the exploration began in my early twenties, when I was working and started playing my instruments more as a way of decompressing after work, as it was too much. I could mix the instrumentation with the productions I was making at the time, as I always made music out of a need, so curiosity is at the beginning of what you’re trying to do. But then you get to a point where you know how to make things on a professional level and it’s more of a necessity.

When I was doing more DJing, I needed things that worked in the dance — the production parameters are for that arena, so when it was a thing of downtime after work, going through heartbreak or a relationship ending, it opened it up more as those parameters weren’t there, but you could use some of those production techniques to convey emotion. Sometimes there might not even be a metronome and things are free of time, you can express more feeling that way. You can still use the same production techniques as if it was a beat, and you can push the sonics in the same way. I think that’s why it was important to mention those first records that I was given, as they don’t necessarily have the thickest of timbres in them, it’s just how it’s produced or the frequencies that are pushed for the instruments to feel the way they do that does it — it feels thicker than what’s actually there, even if it’s minimal instruments. If you go to Carnival and you hear the music on a sound system, it doesn’t fall short anywhere.  

Speaking about your upbringing, having access to classical music training was pivotal to you at a young age. Sadly, through years of government austerity, access to such initiatives has dwindled. How important was it for you when you were younger to have the space to explore classical instrumentation?

To be fair, when I look back now, it was kind of everything. At the time, it was something I took for granted. Access to the lessons and being able to learn the instruments was obviously invaluable, but the community side of it was so important. Everyone went, it was a borough-wide thing every Saturday. So from that I made lifetime friends as well as learning the instrument. I think that’s why, living in London, I could only ever live in the borough of Lewisham, I have so many good memories here and family and friends. Everyone I met either went to school on Saturdays or things like taekwondo, you know. To come back to your question, I think with the cut backs from the government, their objectives are not community focused. They’ll talk about that when they’re building a new development, or doing something to make it sound inclusive, but on the ground it has nothing that would be effected by such decisions. One thing that was special about that time was that it allowed us to have access to classical instruments, free lessons. It gave us a safe space; crime was lower then, and you felt safe as you had your people dem. Those are the things that are lost when you cut back on things, it’s not just access to learn, community dies slowly. It was essentially a youth centre from 9-3; where can kids go to do something constructive like that? For example, I’m fortunate enough for this to be my career now. I wake up and play the clarinet, you get me? That’s something. There’s a lot of people who we were provided that opportunity to further their imagination in a way they probably wouldn’t have been able to.