Dave Okumu is concerned about community. “Everyone is encouraged to go down a solitary road at the moment, where other people don’t matter and you can just find everything out yourself online instead,” he says. “Whereas my vision is about shared experience and cultural enrichment. I want to be around people that I love who inspire me. I want to have an embodied experience where we all feed into each other’s growth.”
On a typically grey, rainy London afternoon, the 46-year-old producer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist is sitting in his Greenwich studio complex, bathed in warm light and the spiced scent of burning palo santo. Over the past three years, Okumu has built this labyrinthine space as a physical manifestation of his collaborative ethos. In the airy rooms surrounding his there is a hive of activity – singer Rosie Lowe is downstairs, while the other spaces are variously occupied by musical director Aviram Barath, singer Eska, engineer Nick Powell and a roster of young instrumentalists and producers.
Read the interview in Huck Magazine.
[This piece was published on 13/04/23]