Sid Pattni has come out of no-where. The Perth-based producer started making beats roughly two months ago and went on to be crowned runner up at The Bird’s annual Beat Down competition merely two weeks after he started fiddling around with beats. He’s now put out his debut EP Le Vidé and it’s taking over airwaves and blogs around the world. ANNABEL MACLEAN chats with the young gun about growing up in Kenya, breaking wrists and being a boss.
“We had to come over because it was getting too unsafe,” a friendly Sid Pattni says down the phone, speaking of Kenya where he grew up for the first 12 years of his life. “Dad had a lot of that stuff playing in the house – we had a lot of African and Indian stuff going on in the house. Our family owned a bank in Kenya so we were one of those families who had the armed escort cars and the range-rover with the bullet proof stuff. We got held at gun point quite a few times. It got really bad so we had to move. Then we come over here and people are leaving their cars unlocked in the road and we’re like ‘what are they doing? It’s going to get robbed any second!’ (laughs).”
With his North-Indian heritage and Kenyan background, a rich array of influences can be heard throughout his debut EP Le Vidé which fuses soul, hip hop and future beats into a tightly knit, brilliant bundle of tunes. The big question of everyone’s lips is: where did Sid Pattni come from? “Everyone keeps saying that to me,” he says, chuffed. “Like ‘what’s happening? Where have you come from?’ seems to be the common question going on. I’m not too sure where I’ve come from. I just sort of put it [the EP] out and everyone’s like ‘wow, this is really cool’ and it’s just taken off.”
Having taught himself piano as a means of physical therapy after he broke his wrist a few years ago, Pattni had previously played drums for 10 years. “I did a gig and the stage was pretty dodgy and the stage was three metres above the ground and I just fell really badly on my wrist and totally shattered it,” he recalls. With doctors predicting 10 per cent mobility in his wrist, he began playing piano, auditioned for WAAPA the following year, got in, and as he says, “the rest is history”.
Pattni went down to watch The Bird’s annual Beat Down competition, ended up entering at the last minute and came runner up. “These guys have been doing this for five or six years and I’d been doing it for a couple of weeks and they were like ‘who are you? Where have you come from?’. I started doing it [producing] more and more and I had enough tracks to make an EP and I thought ‘score, I’ll just put out an EP and see what happens’ and then it’s been ridiculous in terms of what’s been happening since then.”
Indeed, local heavyweight Ta-Ku has even remixed Pattni’s track Got To Learn Sometimes which appears on the EP. “I put my first track out on Soundcloud and emailed out a bunch of producers that I really liked to see what they thought of it and not expecting any replies and he [Ta-Ku] replied back and was like ‘man, this track is amazing, I want to work on it with you’ so I wasn’t going to say no to him. I was surprised he replied… people dream about working with that guy and I got him on my first EP, it’s ridiculous.”
Although Pattni didn’t have an official launch for Le Vidé because he “didn’t really expect it to get this much attention”, life for the fresh beat-maker isn’t quietening down any time soon. “Yesterday I got signed to some record label so I’ve got to put a release out through them now,” he says. “I want to get more airplay and the sample thing could kill me copyright wise [so] I’m getting a lot of guys who I dig around Perth to do vocals on it now and actually do it that way… It’s going to be so good.”
