Artist Profile: Nu Fvnk

Nu Fvnk, the Nairobi-based alternative artist and genre-transient producer, has been enamored with music and its potentialities since he was a child listening to his mom’s collection of CDs, but, now, as he continues to actualize his output and push the boundaries of his distinctly East African sound, both his prowess and his obsession have reached entirely new levels, cementing him as one of the most exciting Kenyan artists to watch at this moment.

As a child, Nu Fvnk was surrounded by both the wide-ranging musical tastes of his mother and the R&B-driven tastes of his peers. 

Around the age of 10, however, he remembers his fondness for music growing when he came to the realization that he could pick out layers in songs, isolating just what the guitar or percussion was doing, and, although he had no musical training, the sole performance of that activity maintained an enduring fascination to him.

Always having a penchant for computers, Nu Fvnk’s first experience with a DAW came when he attempted to produce sounds for a video game he was making. Still just a pre-teen, he downloaded FL Studio on his PC, viewing it as just another game to be played (albeit a more complex one than any he had ever seen).

Over time, this act of producing became more and more of an interest for him, and, when he transferred from a rural boarding school to a more urban, middle class high school, he discovered that he wasn’t entirely alone in this interest. At his new school, he had friends and peers that were also interested in producing, and along with this interest came the gradual realization that his classmates had a love for rap as well. Although he had already developed an interest in the genre earlier, watching videos of Pharrell and Timbaland in the studio, this was the catalyst he needed to truly allow his budding obsession with production to take the forefront in his life.

“I emotionally just connected [with rap] more than any other genre, because you can say what you wanted to say.. If it's on a song, it didn't seem weird, or hard, or awkward, or strange. I saw a lot of vulnerability in rap music that maybe I couldn't hear anywhere else, or anybody would talk to me about it. I found that in hip-hop and rap music.”

While his music does not always comfortably conform to the genre constraints of hip-hop, there is certainly an overarching rap influence to his sound.

His first album, COLOR MAN, takes on a pulsing, up-beat forefront as a medium to relay his complex rhythms and eclectic samples, pulling simultaneously from the dancehall roots of his region as well as the colliding rhythms of his favorite producers.

His second album, Money & Other Things, not only takes on a wider range of influences and sources of samples but also endeavors for a slower, mellower sound, toning down some of the up-front percussion of his first project in favor of more reverb-soaked vocals and almost psychedelic melody lines.

Yet, what defines Nu Fvnk’s sonic output more than anything else is his overwhelming love for music as a global phenomenon. From Japanese Synth Pop to mid-century American Country music, his tastes and, by expansion, his desires to incorporate new sounds into his production are almost endless.

His newest album, a more dance-oriented record, will be composed almost fully of samples from music recorded by the Kikuyu tribe: his ancestral people. Many Kikuyu artists over the last few decades has been highly influenced by Kenny Rogers’ records from the ‘70s and ‘80s, and Nu Fvnk has a genuine feeling that, on top being a singularly special record, his newest album will also shine a light on some of the work of his people that may otherwise rest in obscurity.

“I'm doing something that will be adjacent to [Kaytranada], but I'm sampling all Kikuyu music, just wanting to bring that to the dance floor in a cool way…For me,  [Afro House] doesn't contain that soul, and I love something like Kanye and that era where there's a bounce to it. I would say it sounds like Kaytranada, something like Timbaland and Pharrell but [with a heavy influence] from Kenyan traditional music.”