Words by Emma Warren

When rapper, producer & musician, Louis J Butler aka Louis VI was 14, he faked an ID. This wasn’t to buy alcohol or get into clubs – it was for the purpose of education. The free music production course that the London School of Sound was running was for over 18s, but needs must and he finagled himself in front of an early versions of Reason. It was the beginning of a repeated inventiveness that marks his work composing for adverts, short films and his own music videos.  

The North Londoner has just finished the music for the Premier League’s new, No Room For Racism’ campaign. The video features top-flight players including Tyrone Mings, was voiced by Kojey Radical and directed by Marvin Jay. 

The job required him to write and evolve three tracks through the 60 second ad. “It needed hope and a bit of emotion but not too much like ‘racism’s over’,” he said. “How do I convey these emotions? I think you have to really trust in yourself, which is difficult… I’m not just a musician here, I’m a translator of the director’s emotions.”

He’s explicit about his politics in the sense of life politics rather than party politics. His label Misfit Mafia is environmentally sustainable and he recently scored Tanya Nouska’s documentary, The World Is (Y)Ours, which was premiered on Dazed and which aimed to put Black and Brown voices back into the climate change conversation. “I’m a super geek on the music side and on the science side,” he says, referring to his Zoology degree from Bristol University. “My dream job would be to do a nature doc, and to narrate it.” 

He and Tanya Nouska are both part of members collective We Are POCC which exist to improve the experience of people of colour within the creative industries. His politics extends, naturally, to his experiences as a composer in relation to his Dominican heritage. “To be blunt, I’ve never met a POC composer or a POC music advisor,” he says. “It’s rare. The word composer suggests an old, slightly grey-haired, slightly large white guy with an orchestra. The reality is different. Even the greats now use MIDI instruments. When I tell people I compose for film it’s met with a reaction of surprise. “Oh, I thought you were a rapper.” I’m a musician and that involves all types of music.”

Mostly, he’s expressing his musicianship through his dual skills of production and live instrumentation. He learned jazz drums and keys at school and at extra-curricular lessons – his jazz trio were the last band to play with George Melly before he died – but continued his autodidact production path in the years after his summer school beginnings. 

Whilst the traditional beatmaker digs for samples, Louis prefers to sample himself. "I don’t have to clear it and I can manipulate it in a crazy way without insulting anyone.” Fortunately, he has a lot of material to work with, with over fifteen master folders and over 3,500 songs. “Put it this way, I cannot find an efficient way to organise my music into one folder. I need too many hard drives. It’s a deep, deep library.”

He’s applying his skills in a few directions. He’s made library music for KPM and composed music for commercials including Nike’s ‘Limitless’ which won NOWNESS Top Editor’s Pick as well as ads for Puma, Footlocker, Azimo, and a 2017 four-film series for Tanqueray. He’s also an artist in his own right, releasing his well-received debut album ‘Sugar Like Salt’ two years ago and appearing on one of Boiler Room’s highly-regarded Streaming From Isolation Sessions. 

His producer-musician duality is a good fit for a moment in time when London is popping with highly-trained musicians who also have a sophisticated awareness of Black Atlantic music styles from cumbia to bashment and hip hop. He’s been connected with now-famous London musicians like Nubya Garcia and Moses Boyd for years, originally through the act of contacting Boyd to see if he’d drum with his other more hip-hop focused group OthaSoul (he did) and through the musicians appearing on his recordings. 

"I keep getting asked to do jazz, but without the strict rules and that’s because of what the London scene has done. It’s allowed people’s definitions to be less rigid. Can you call this jazz? Yes, but it’s something else as well. It’s hip hop, years of London dub and reggae. It’s a great place to be.”

His studio in Tottenham is centred around his Focal Shape 65 speakers and a laptop running through an Apollo Twin MKII interface. Given his predisposition for lyrics – he’s also a rapper and has vocals on most of his tunes – microphones matter and he’s glowing about his growing range of microphones including the Lewitt 840 and 540 LCP. “I love those mics, they're phenomenally warm”. There’s also a drum kit and a Fender Jazz Bass, the ‘phenomenal’ Addictive Drums II, an old Casio keyboard, a MicroKorg, Novation Impulse 49 and Ableton Launchpad. “What else? I have lots of film containers with cous cous or beans in it which I use as shakers.”

The Nike ‘Limitless’ job really pushed him to the limit, not least because at this point, he’d only ever composed one piece of music for adverts and was supposedly only working on the shoot as a production assistant. “I get a phone call at 5pm saying the director needed a whole new track by the next morning. I was having to pretend that I was cool, I put the phone down and almost had a nervous breakdown.” The references were ‘trancey, electronic, quite neon’ or in other words, quite far from his usual sound. He went for a walk to nearby Hampstead Heath, had three coffees and got started. It got to 4am and he didn’t have anything. Enter PaulStretch, and something clicked. By 6am he had something and by 7am it was done.

He’s a collaborative composer, preferring to work closely with the editor and the director on references and ideas. “The hardest thing is when they chuck a bunch of words at you: ‘this needs to be more rousing’ or ‘more swaggy’.” It can also be hard to retain the integrity of the music in the face of endless client changes, but experience has taught him that it’s just about doing it. “Every time I feel like an imposter. Where is the sound going to come from? Every time I just start and eventually, you catch something.”

Now he’s working on a new Louis VI album and turning his radar to new mediums. “I’d love to do games, or even more, a cartoon. What Joe Wong did with ‘Midnight Gospel’ was phenomenal. I’m inspired by RZA doing ‘Afro Samurai’ and Yoko Kanno and The Seatbelts’ music to ‘Cowboy Bebop’. 

“That’s where it’s heading,” he says. “A blur of mediums.”