Gainesville Creator Rahku Sits Down with Strike GNV
There is a linearity in modern-day creativity. Songs follow familiar patterns, artists make art, musicians make music.
But Rahku, a Gainesville transplant and creator, saw synonymy across genres, and is stepping in to meld a creative crossover. With his most recent project and corresponding EP, “Samsara,” Rahku is bending the lines in modern art and music.
It started with anime doodles. Art was the first creative endeavor Rahku embarked on, when he used to draw sketches as a kid.
The doodles fell by the wayside for a while after he chose to go to school for audio engineering, kicking off his trajectory toward music.
“When I was younger, when flip phones were around, I used to love ringtones. That was the thing that made me realize, ‘I want to make music.’”'
The ringtone on repeat? Gorillaz “Feel Good, Inc.” Until the advent of the MP3 player, Rahku used to replay the 30-second excerpt over and over.
With a natural flair for the technological side of sound, his parents helped shape the variety in his musical ear. Both from Trinidad and Tobago, Rahku’s childhood was filled with ubiquitous sounds of reggae and soca.
After starting music school, Rahku expected to immediately be making beats, but ended up soldering wires and building speakers.
The mechanics of music reminded him of other facets of engineering. Like how electricity requires routine movements and transfers in wires, music requires the same movements and transfers in sound.
“Electri[cal work] and music engineering are very synonymous in how they work, logically,” he said. “It's signal flow: this has to go through this thing, to go to this thing.”
Foundations of sound, from reverb to sonics, now had an underlying explanation of their rhythm. At the same time Rahku was in engineering school, he was encountering spirituality.
Finding parallels in between classroom and cognition, Rahku noted how electricity moves in us the same way it moves in objects; the spiritual sciences echoing principles of sound engineering.
Sound vibrates water in specific ways, and since our bodies are primarily water, the ways music impacts our movement makes sense.
“[Music] literally creates geometric patterns inside of us, and you feel that and it animates through your body,” Rahku said.
Spirituality is the underlying inspiration for both his art and his music, one he tries to draw out in others through his crafted experiences, albeit not in the traditional trials of spirit.
“You know when you go to church and it's like, ‘I don’t want to be here,’” he said. “The intention is good, but the format is not relatable – you can't necessarily relate to it in your everyday life.”
Rather than preaching prose, Rahku’s experiences are designed to confront his audience in a thought-provoking way. He wants to leave people with questions.
“Samsara” was his most recent foray into the field. An experience held on the same day his corresponding EP was released, it took listeners through three phases of the cycle of life: a ‘stuck’ phase, an ‘angry’ phase and an ‘understanding’ phase.
Held at the Gainesville Fine Arts Association, Samsara included three separate spaces for the phases. Each had its own soundtrack, rage’s scene set by heavy metal and hard rock, and understanding’s by a calming strain.
Within each scene, contributing artists made objects further challenging the audience. A ceramic artist brought a teapot, prompting analysis about what people are pouring into themselves everyday. Other such normal objects pulled meaning out of the everyday, pushing past surface-level practicality.
Outside of his work, Rahku touts meditation and nature as essentials of everyday life, biking around Gainesville locales like Paynes Prairie, Hawthorne Trail and Depot Park.
Setting the scene in his headphones is afrofuturism, a subgenre of jazz.
“Some of it is dissonant,” Rakhu said, “It's very hard to listen to, but I find it mimics life, in a way. We have chaos, but if you're able to stay calm and centered through it, then at the end of it, like the harmonic parts come back again.”
Modern music can be numbing, the same four-bar loop dragging listeners through predetermined structures of sound, Rahku explained. Jazz breaks that pattern. Its scenes and sounds build moments in time, shadowing life, rather than constructing musical monotony.
For his future projects, the creator is digging into sensory experiences like “Samsara,” but next time in different locations, environments and sounds.
“[I want] people to ask themselves questions, even if they're not telling me the answer, or you, or anyone else. A seed is planted in their heads, like, ‘I never thought about it that way.’”
Strike out,
Writer: Kate Corcoran
Editor: AJ Bafer
Gainesville
