Track of the Week "Somewhere" by Sipho The Gift is a catchy yet explorative track, beginning with the questions every musician gets asked: "You rap, right? So why don't we see your videos on TV or something? Why aren't you balling?" It tries to address the difficulties of being "somewhere between" as an artist, as a creator and as a man. Featuring US-based Well$, “Somewhere” is set to nuanced yet simple music, with harps and croons in just the right place. The track is refreshing, thought-provoking and cleanly produced – right where it needs to be.
Twenty-one-year-old Stellenbosch-based Sipho The Gift is part of a new generation of rapper-producers with distinct voices that the rest of the world can't seem to get enough of. He began his musical journey tinkering with FL Studio software and picked up experience producing as part of hip-hop act The Black Hearts Club alongside the worldly Alec Lomami. He is also a key member of the Immaculate Taste label along with fellow musos Well$, Lomami and Lucho. His move from his hometown, Kimberley, to study at Stellenbosch University set him on a course to carve out a path of his own during which he discovered first hand that creativity can be best bred in places of the most difficulty.
“It was a huge culture shock just getting here. I have no family on this side and no friends... It was at a sensitive stage when I was learning how to become a man so there were a bunch of challenges that I went through. Even a short stint of maybe a bit of depression,” he told Rifumo Mdaka of Feedback Musiq in an interview earlier this year.
Sipho The Gift found solace in his music to soothe the loneliness and the result is the Coming Of Age EP, set for release in early 2015.
In the same interview he says: “I use the music to paint my own realities 'coz people create their own religions, people create their own laws, people create their own legislature, but I started to create my own pictures and tell my own story of what it means to be a man for me.”
