DURING a series of performance residencies this year titled Satellite Business, Sampha played in a circle of musicians — different voices, synths, drums, and electronics vying gracefully for center stage. The shows required smaller, more intimate venues, like St. John at Hackney Church in London, where he performed three nights in October ahead of the release of his new album, Lahai. “It looked beautiful in there, and aesthetically just felt like the right kind of place to have it,” Sampha says. The British singer-songwriter describes his new album as “thinking a lot about time, divinity, infinity, and connection.” And as circles became a motif in his songwriting for this project, the idea behind Satellite Business took shape. “Playing in the round created this intimate, almost ethereal atmosphere,” he says. “They were quite special shows. I definitely felt a lot of love from the crowd.”
Lahai, Sampha’s first release since 2017’s Process, is an intricately woven existential treatise. Album opener “Stereo Colour Sound (Shaman’s Dream)” begins with a set of slippery declarations courtesy of London-based vocalist Sheila Maurice-Grey. “I Miss You,” bleeds phonetically into “Time Misuse” before a jubilant breakbeat pierces through and Sampha’s celestial concerns unfurl. “The trees are talking in their frequency/Something close to sound,” he sings before launching into the song’s chorus, where questions like “Who do you care about?” arrive alongside warnings to “watch who you care about.” On “Dancing Circles,” he’s contending with the provenance of memory, recounting a story of love passed under a delicate and transfixing piano melody. Here, circles play a role in the narrative as romantic endings and beginnings blend into oblivion.
A frequent collaborator with heavyweights like Drake, Kendrick Lamar, and Solange, Sampha is a kind of emotional secret weapon for artists hoping to transmit something deeper to their listeners. Lahai presents his most pristine transmission yet. The album feels like a corroding of memory’s linear impulse, exposing more elaborate continuities tethering us together in each moment. A few days before the album’s release, Sampha spoke with Rolling Stone about creating his Satellite Business shows, and how the performances relate to his new album.
I got a chance to see your New York show a few months ago. I’m so curious about how you came up with what’s become the defining performance around this album.
Yeah, I guess on my album I was thinking a lot about time, and divinity, and infinity, and connection. And circles in some way just become a repeating theme in some of my visual references, and also in some of my songwriting. So just thinking of an interesting way to play in a way that I hadn’t played in before, which was playing in the round and calling the night Satellite Business, I guess creating this, what could be seen as maybe a satellite and part of the meaning behind that, really just the connection and the searching and creating that connection with the audience.
I feel like having the performers align in that way definitely does something different for the crowd. Is that something that you’ve noticed over time as you guys have performed more?
I think so. Obviously it’s difficult being on stage and not actually … but even when I’m off-stage or in the pre-production and I’m sort of walking around, and I like the fact I can see a different perspective of the gear of the musicians on the stage. It gives it a bit more of a 3D-ness to it, or even a 4D-ness kind of vibe as opposed to being sort of, I guess, on the conventional stage at the front. It creates a different level of depth in some way.
What’s your relationship with the other musicians that you’ve been performing with?
Most of them I came across on the journey of trying to find a new band. And Ruffin, who’s an artist and someone I knew of his music before, he joined my band. But they’re all kind of artists in their own right, and they all have quite eclectic taste, which I feel was really valuable for playing in this band. So everyone plays an instrument, but they also sing, and they’re also into synths and production. They all produce their own music, so they have quite a holistic view on creating music and playing it, and so that’s been really valuable.
One thing I noticed at the show that I saw was you guys would switch between different instruments a bunch, too. I thought that was really interesting.
Yeah, so everyone was competent at playing percussion, moving from percussion roles to … even playing percussion and playing a synth for the same time, or drumming or using SPDs and singing. So yeah, there’s a lot of multitasking going on.
As you take this out into the larger world and people start to hear the album, what do you hope one of the big takeaways is from all of this?
I never really make records or haven’t to this point wondering what people would take away from it. I guess in retrospect, if there’s something in the record that people kind of empathize with, that for me is … If there’s a moment of sonic empathy or something that makes someone feel some sort of comfort or reassurance in some way, either because it’s someone expressing something that they’re going through, more than anything. That’s all I could really hope for is that it resonates emotionally in some way. And there’s things obviously my ego would like people to take in terms of production and songwriting and all that kind of stuff. But I guess for me as an artist, it’s just I’m someone who’s on a road of self-discovery and I’m just trying to be more confident in sharing my intuitions and my preoccupations and my thoughts and feelings. And it’s okay to experiment in both directions, whether it’s going more left or more or being in the middle.
Questions of maturing come up a lot on the album. And you mentioned before about thinking about time and connection. I’m wondering how much you feel like you’ve embedded that into the live show and into the rollout of the album.
Oh yeah, definitely. There’s been this kind of weird overlapping. I guess I touch on time and thinking about it’s nonlinearity, which might be akin to some sort of Afro-futurist notions, but also playing some of these songs early before the albums come out. Some of the songs have taken on a different life of their own, which I’ve gone and rerecorded some of those songs, so it does play on that kind of notion of time in a sense of going back and readdressing something and also looking forward. It’s interesting that even the process of releasing a record and what does a record mean in terms of a document of time, even sculpting, that kind of … What’s the word I’m looking for? I think recognizing that there’s scope for even change or documentation in that context of playing something live and it taking a life of its own and it changing and evolving, and it feeding back into potential recordings or it creating a path for where we could go, or I could go, musically as well.
Given the album’s themes, were you thinking about making things that actually stand in time versus being more ephemeral?
Yeah, I guess there’s a few things going on. Obviously I feel like, as a person, it’s kind of up to you how much … There’s a lot that you can take in and there’s a lot of stimulus out in the world, so I feel like on a personal level or even collectively, it can be difficult to make things stick just because there’s just so much of it. And so there is an element of personal responsibility, but also even as a community of people, giving people space and time to be able to develop ideas and create things that they feel will be, I guess, long-lasting or things that feel like they have … they’re substantial. But it’s all perspective. Is quite a subjective thing in terms of how something sticks, basically.