CHIKÉ SHARES HIS HARMONIES IN THE NEW DIGITAL ISSUE OF SIMPLE MAGAZINE

Love and music have always been entwined by spell-binding harmonies. Harmonies that only a few are capable of wielding its magic wand to bedazzle at will. Chiké Ezekpeazu proves himself a sonic warlock with his offering of amazing stories encapsulated in bewitching harmonies tagged “Boo of the Booless” Chiké is a master of carefully serenading lyrics with empathic tones that carries his art of storytelling straight to the heart. Chiké discusses his sound and journey with RAYO KASALI over a light workout session. How would you classify your own music? Afro-story! Like I say, music is a feeling to me, so, if I feel pop, I go Pop. And if I feel soul, I go Soul, but I believe the Soul is always going to be there. Your album was tagged “Boo of The Booless” and then your EP was tagged “Dance of The Booless”, what inspires these names? It was my team; we just decide to do a dance-feel. Going back to your album, why “Boo of the Booless”? On Boo of the Booless, after making the music, we went through everything that was done; we definitely observed the emotional journey from love to pain to sacrifice and all. And there’s a lot of people, who feel these things and feel other people don’t understand them or other people haven’t been there, so Boo of The Booless was more of a statement to say “I understand how it feel and I have there before.” Being your first body of work, did you have any reservation as to what the reception will be like for someone that’s relatively new? Well, you need to take risks, for me it’s a risk worth taking because it’s something I believe in, it’s me singing my truth and being creative. In the early weeks of the release, how do you feel the response was, do you feel it was up to what you expected? It exceeded my expectations but that was what we were working for to achieve. Lets go back to your participation in Mtn Project Fame 2015 and Voice of Nigeria in 2016, what was the experience like? It’s good one, the record are there. Do you listen to lots of alternative song because listening to your album; I felt some sound from Cold Play? To be honest, I listen to lots of people from different genre; I’m more of an Afro-fusion and story telling artiste. From the Voice of Nigeria, you signed to Universal Republic and shortly you left the label, was it the classical case of label wanting to control content or trying to pattern what they think the artiste should be? To summarize it all, we just had different dreams and at the end of it all we sat down to communicate about it and wished each other best of luck. After studying engineering at Covenant University, how were you able to convince your parent that music is what you wanted to do? I already had a university degree before I decided to go into music, so they felt I was an adult I could make my own decisions. Lets talk about your creative process, while making your music how easy or hard is it to find a rhythm? For me it’s nothing hard, anytime I’m motivated and inspired, I work. There’s part of distributing and royalties we still don’t understand, do you think you’ve personally worked around for yourself? For me, I got burnt early, so I learnt with time. I guess I was at the stage where I just figured out that I had to get things done. That made me learn a couple of basic things I needed to know like distribution and royalties, but then I have a amazing team that does that now. Personally which song on your album is your favorite that represents you the most? I don’t have a favourite because I actually recorded all of them at different times and they’re all personal. Going forward, after “Dance of the Booless”, what’s next on the plate for you? More work, I’m definitely working on more music and as you know I’m an actor so we are working on something too. What advice do you have upcoming artistes that are trying to bridge the gap between quality and quantity? For me, one thing that helped me was research and learning. They have to learn how it’s done; they need to do more research and they might find some more clever way of doing things.