LURU Hangs w/ musician & producer Sakré

The difference between noise and music is simply intention.

“My moniker is my surname, it means ‘sugar’ in Kannada,” states Sakré aka Joel Sakkari, Dharwad-born, Bengaluru-based musician and producer. Perched on the thick, gnarly branches of a giant raintree near Ulsoor Lake, he recalls “being quite embarrassed and bullied” for his surname in school but then, he “just took it” as his performer name.

Sakré has turned these lemons into sweet, sweet music. He’s a “sample-based” musician whose current work revolves around “sampling South Indian cinema, sounds of Bengaluru and off-late, I’ve been exploring Qawwali music and trying to sample that.”

Handel with care

Sakré has been playing music since he was a ten-year-old. He was first introduced to music while playing the piano in the church; practising there “because it was a very prominent part of the whole community.” At 15, “I started learning the guitar and it became my main instrument,” he says. He remembers making this shift because “the piano was nice” but it was “a very academic instrument.” At least, when he was a kid playing the piano, it seemed like “there were a lot of rules and things had to be done in a certain way. On the other hand, the guitar was a much cooler instrument to look at,” he admits.

At the same time, he started reading a lot of books and watching a lot of YouTube videos on guitars and guitar players. “And I felt that guitar players were much more musically free to experiment. That caught my attention, and then I picked up a guitar,” he says. Because of his background in piano, he learned to play the guitar fairly easily. “Eventually, I started recording myself because I had a small tape machine and a computer. I figured, okay, if I can record and hear myself back, maybe I can hear my own mistakes,” he adds. That’s how Sakré “started recording things” and “eventually, got into producing music” because he was “fascinated by new sounds.”

In time, he added “software-based music production” into his tool kit. But he’s always looking to grow his strengths. “Very recently, I [was] introduced to this Arabic instrument called the oud, which I’m still learning,” he says with tentative excitement. With nerdy enthusiasm, he begins to go down the history of this instrument. He rattles off information ranging from “the oud being the ancestor of the modern-day guitar” to the similarities between the instruments, but also pointing out that “sound-wise, [the oud] doesn’t have frets, so you can flow between notes,” contributing to the “very deep and mystic-like sound” of this short-necked string instrument. He’s teaching himself the Arabic maqam system, which “introduces a lot of microtones” that are “these notes that fall in between the sharps and flats” in Western music theory. “My technical abilities are very limited with this instrument. I’m still a newbie. Kind of exploring that sound at the moment,” he says with measured excitement.

Punk as a skunk

This sensibility for sound fuels Sakré’s “current style of sample-based music production,” he explains while setting up his equipment at a cafe. Over the past four years, he has started “looking at sampling as a voice” but also “as a photograph” that captures the essence of a particular place. He believes that “every place has a sound” and for him “these sounds evoke a certain emotion, they mean something.”

For him, one of the “very important parts” of the soundscape of Bengaluru is the “80s South Indian cinema music.” While growing up, he listened to rock, metal, and jazz but while he wasn’t “actively listening” to South Indian cinema music, it “has a special place in my heart” because “of the physical spaces” they colour from his memories. An ambulance’s siren interjects our conversation, and he reminds us “that even these sounds evoke something” when sampled in a track.

Stationed at a cafe table, Sakré breaks down his process of making music for us. “I shot in India Coffee House for ‘Baa Illi’, a track from my album, Bangalore Sonic Archives. That place is actually like a time capsule. Visually, of course, it looks a certain way but I had to imagine: what would this place sound like?” He took a snippet from an 80s Tamil film song, reinterpreted that through a sampler – Sakré works with Roland SP-404 – and made a beat around it. “In this way, I bring the visual and the audio together. So, it sounds like this song belongs to this place, or at least my sonic interpretation of that place,” he explains.

For another track ‘Chandni’ from the same album, he brings together a phrase from A, “an iconic Kannada classic by Upendra, “who cannot be separated from Bengaluru” with sounds from around a ficus tree to “capture the spirit of that tree” because this city is known for its trees,” he says, peeling back a layer of the creative process. Other city sounds he’s used are the shrill sounds of a nadaswaram player, aggravated honking, the sounds of birds, “as long [they] help paint a picture” for him.

This musical malleability finds reflection in Sakré’s performance style: he’s venue agnostic. He’s able to weave in and out, transforming tables at cafes, supermarket aisles, and even the street corner into a concert venue. “I don't think that I would be able to really play and perform anywhere in a cafe or [anywhere else] without people being accepting of it. So I kind of owe it to Bangalore,” he sweetly says.

Listen to Sakré’s albums here.

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LURU Hangs with... is a monthly LURU Newsletter series which takes you behind the processes and pleasures of the city’s artists.