Words by Emma Warren

Gaika Tavares comes from a creative family. He is a highly-respected producer with releases on key electronic music labels like Naafi and Warp; soundtrack credits on the BBC’s recent ‘Noughts and Crosses’; and a composition CV that covers the English National Ballet and Ballet Rambert. His brother is film director Kibwe Tavares and his father was part of London’s sonically-inventive soundsystem culture before becoming a scientist. It’s no wonder, then, that he makes ‘sounds you’re not going to hear anywhere else’.

What’s been your studio set up during lockdown? 

I’m working in a secret cupboard but I’m hoping to get back into the studio soon. I have racks of synthesisers, I have an Oberheim Matrix 6 and Roland Integra, I have various amps and pre-amps. I’m a hardware guy, really. I have another big Roland studio piano. A lot of it's keys based. I use bass guitars and sample them. I don’t really sample records. I use soft synths, sampled-based synths, I use a lot of vocal pedals. I don’t really use drum synths or software sample drums, I like drums you can hit. I use a lot of pads. I use an array of stuff inside and outside the box. I’m into the quality of sound.

During lockdown you started an online performance called Nine Nights. What’s the intention? 

I’ve been in a situation a few too many times where the effect of my labour isn’t really shared with myself, or with the people it needs to be. We’re all in that position, irrespective of race or gender. We go to work and we don’t really think about what happens to what we generate. I’m pretty militant about making sure that what I do has positive impact in the world. The economy for musicians at the moment is really precarious. Most people were reliant on touring. The things I do should benefit the musicians and not the hedge fund or the people that have positions at Spotify who have done nothing to actually make the situation for musicians less precarious. It’s a labour issue. All the workers continuing to work for low pay and an inverted pyramid: People charging rent, space on the internet, collecting all the money. It made me think that I need to enter the online arena in a more meaningful way and that starts with performance. We do have a particular focus on Black people because I’m Black. World events have brought these things to the front of my mind but there isn’t a day when I don’t have to consider my race. I’ve been talking about these things in my work for a decade.

The traditional Nine Nights is part of a funeral process in Jamaican culture, part of grieving. What is your Nine Nights saying goodbye to? 

The old way. I want to mourn and celebrate the people we’ve lost to police brutality. We’re going back to normal but the Black people keep dying from Covid-19. Racism is insidious. It’s totally normalised. I want to celebrate and mourn the people we lost but I want to signify the end of acceptance of that.

It’s a radical transparency, being extremely clear about what something is for, and who it’s for…

That’s it. In the music industry a lot of time you have to tip-toe around these things. In the past, I’ve not tip-toed and that’s put me out on a limb. I’m not silly, I know people don’t want to hear about the elephant in the room, but at the end of the day I couldn’t not. Personal fame and wealth doesn’t matter if this is still normal.

What’s the plan for the remaining events in the Nine Nights series?

There will be a big finale and we will do something around Carnival. It’s about self-sufficiency and doing things on a high level. All the people I run it with are Black women who were working at labels or streaming entities that were passed over irrespective of their talent. It’s wrong that happens. It’s also completely inefficient and stupid, on a very practical level.

Do you prefer to plan or improvise? 

Improvise, definitely. 

Where did improvisation sit in the making of the live soundtrack to the film ‘Black Mother’?

I made a few tracks as a basic score and left space for other instrumentation and other players. Then I set the electronics up so I could play the synths and the samples and show the process of making it, inside out, on stage. I added performers into the mix so the art of making it became an art form itself. People could watch the film and share our critique of that film. I don’t know if the director [Khalik Allah] appreciated the critique, but at the end of the day, there’d never been this sense that you couldn’t critique someone’s work if you were involved in a conversation with it … If you remix something it’s because you have to be adding to its commercial value. It’s not the same in art critique, or cultural letter-writing. Applying that to music and film in real time was eye-opening. 

So on the day of the performance you arrived with a rough outline, a set up and two vocalists. Were the players playing from charts or were they improvising? 

They had screens, showing how I’d make the live score in my studio. We’re not working to a clock or a musical sheet, we’re working to the picture. We had multiple screens in front of us and behind us so they know when to come in. What it makes for is quite a tight performance. Everything is locked together. It’s dynamic. You can judge the audience response, you can control the mood. I had a set of drums set up and one of the players did a whole improv section. It takes influence from freeform jazz and rap music or grime, with people coming in and out. 

When you say grime, what bit of grime do you mean?

Multiple people on stage interacting around a central theme, focused energy, some of the sounds. I’m not talking about grime 2.0. I’m talking about [very early 2000s grime rave venues] Stratford Rex, Sidewinder, Sun City even before grime – garage. The collective energy that burst out of soundsystem culture and the children of soundmen. 

Literally. 

Literally. I’m one of them. Emulating their fathers and their uncles with electronic music. ‘The Black Mother' is a Jamaican movie so for me it had to have a bit of that energy. 

What soundsystems are in your family networks?

My dad was a DJ in [major London soundsystem] Sufferer in the late 1970s then he left and became a scientist.

What was the technical set up you used for ‘The Black Mother’?

A Korg Minilogue, assorted pedals. Drum machine, Roland drum pad that you can programme with different samples and my computer running different bits of audio I bounced down. A mic with processors. I made quite elaborate diagrams…I didn’t have a tour manager or a tech. I didn’t have time to learn how to miniaturise or hide all the processes and at some point made an aesthetic decision that I wanted everyone to see the wires or the machinery. It’s not hidden away. 

Your music appeared on the acclaimed TV show ‘Noughts and Crosses’. Did they licence the tune that appears on the soundtrack? 

No, My brother [Kibwe Tavares] was the director. They licensed the music and they asked me to do the theme tune. Matthew Herbert did the original music then they asked me to remix the theme song. I remade it and they used it for the end credits in every episode. It became a much bigger involvement.

If we think about you more as a composer than a producer, what lineage do you sit in? Who are the people who combine composition with a radical purpose, if that’s the right word? 

It goes back through Goldie, A Guy Called Gerald, Detroit’s Underground Resistance. It’s parallel with Jamaican music and jazz music. Those are the things I grew up with. 

Anyone else? 

Jackie Mittoo, simply because it’s about keyboard music and trying to do something new all the time. I am a visual artist, I was making film work before. I ran away from the Basiquat [comparison] but as I get older I think it’s probably true. I’m directly influenced by a lot of mid ‘80s graphic design culture in general and the fact it’s connected to music scenes. I was never a tagger, but my connection with art came from the built environment. ‘Mezzanine’ really influenced me, and the whole of Massive Attack’s presence and melding of those things.

What was your starting point on ‘Aisha and Abhaya’, a recent collaboration with Ballet Rambert and English National Ballet?

Inside the studio with the dancers. Understanding the physical exertion. Getting rhythm for what the choreography was about and trying to marry that what the story was about. As I’m watching them I’ll make stuff in Logic: beats, synth parts, sounds. I’d go back to the hotel where I had a synth set-up and build on those ideas. They’d sit on my hard drive, I’d submit some of those for the dancers to work with. The film part, I composed to the picture. I’ve got big screens and I’d just play along to what I can see. I’m coming at scoring from this perspective of making finished commercial records as opposed to pure scoring. I’ll then take what I’ve made and mix it down as if I’m trying to put out a pop record – really tidy it up. I try to use my voice and try and get it into the sequence in a way that doesn’t take away from the sequence or make it feel like a music video. It’s a balancing act but it’s a process I like. I’m bringing together all the things I really enjoy doing.

What’s your relationship with video games? 

We always had video games. We might not have had any food but we always had the latest computers, from very young. Learnt how they worked and how to get around them. I’d be lying if I said they didn’t have any influence [but] it was more learning a way around computers very young and very quickly. I can make a computer do what I need it to do, without really being a computer nerd. We had an Atari ST to play games and to draw things. This idea of a playable touchable structure that interferes with all your senses, that came from video games. I did a big playable structure last year that had a video game I’d made on it, for [exhibition celebrating 50 years of Black British creativity] ‘Get Up Stand Up’ at Somerset House. It was an audiovisual game that you could never win and it was soundtracked by a mixtape. 

What is your go-to piece of kit? 

It changes with each thing. Recently I’ve been composing a lot with AI generative tools, running the MIDI through very old synthesisers. I want to make sounds you can’t hear anywhere, making an ‘80s synth make really bendy microtonal sounds.