Artist Profile: Zekke

Zekke, the multi-faceted artist from Malaysia, has spent the few short years of his music career balancing his ever-shifting tastes and the stylization of his output, but, now, as he has become more comfortable within his own abilities, he feels as though he has struck a perfect balance within his artistic niche, with his new EP, “Render”, serving as a representation of the new directionality of his sound.

As a child, music was not something that was even on Zekke’s radar. Growing up in a strictly Christian household, his media intake was severely limited by his mother, and his focus lay primarily on athletic performance. When he was a young teenager, however, his father gifted him an acoustic guitar: a gift that, while it at first confused him, turned out to be undeniably formative in his young mind.

“One day, my dad was picking me up from school, and he just had an acoustic guitar in the backseat [for me]... My first reaction was like, ‘What the f*ck, dad? Do you even know me? I'm trying to be like a volleyball player; I'm trying to play basketball.” But I remember, over the next few weeks after I got the guitar, I just started picking up some chords and I was just like, ‘Nah, this is pretty cool.”

While he learned his first few chords, which enabled him to play most pop songs, and largely stayed stagnant in his guitar abilities for years, there was another formative experience during this time that opened his brain to the artistic possibilities that music presented. His mother got him an iPod that she planned to fill with music of her choice, but she didn’t realize that it came pre-loaded with certain songs outside of her control.

From these songs, Zekke discovered pop music for the first time, and later on, as his friends introduced him to Youtube, his taste for music became ever-consuming. He first fell in love with artists like Linkin Park and Eminem, with the aggressiveness and emotional nature of their sounds and subject matter contrasting sharply with what he had grown up around.

Yet, it was only when he discovered Daniel Ceasar, and the velvety grooves and melodic prowess of modern R&B, that he felt he had truly found music that spoke to him.

“To have someone like Daniel kind of package the same emotion, the same philosophical weight, in such a nice, velvety, tender tone was just absolutely mind-blowing to me, you know? Because these, these punk songs can be so [aggressive], but then Daniel Caesar comes in and says, ‘If a leopard never changes its spots, how can I change what I've got?.. It was just poetry [to me].”

Therefore, as he graduated high school, Zekke became inspired to begin experimenting creatively. He started taking on photography as a hobby, and, as he became more ingratiated in his local artistic community, he was introduced to people who made music as well, empowering to begin to attempt to put the songs he had written and the guitar abilities he had gained into concrete form.

Despite his tastes largely still remaining in some of the heavier music he enjoyed at the time, he conceptualized Zekke as more of a singer-songwriter project, and his earlier tracks, in their profound simplicity and indie-leaning aspects of their production, display this in full force.

Yet, on his new EP, “Render”, Zekke has taken a bold step; he has begun incorporating more rap-inspired production and lyrical aspects to his sound, a counterintuitive process that almost mirrors in reverse how his personal tastes have developed. While this step in his sound represents, in part, the natural evolution of his improvisational creative process, it also represents a new balance he has found between his clashing tastes, perhaps signifying a new form of Zekke’s output in the process.

“I always felt a need to separate the two. I guess maybe it's just human nature… but I feel like only in recent times those two people inside of me have liked, managed to have a conversation and get to know each other a little bit… That's why I called [this EP] “Render”, because it's loading, right? So I don't really know what exactly this is, but I know it's rendering right now. And I just got to wait for the final product to come up.”