Joel Sakkari, who performs as Sakré, has a theory about why certain songs feel inescapable. Growing up in Karnataka, he was surrounded by South Indian music from the likes of Ilaiyaraaja, Hamsalekha, Rajan-Nagendra and others.
“These songs used to be playing everywhere. You could not escape them,” he says. What began as an osmotic experience has since become the structural backbone of everything he makes. As a producer and guitarist who builds beats almost entirely outside a computer — primarily on the SP 404, a hardware sampler with a devoted cult following among beatmakers in hip-hop and electronic music — Sakré has carved out a sound that takes the harmonic richness of beloved Kannada and Tamil film music and processes them the way a jazz musician might, not to replicate, but to improvise.
Earlier this month, Sakré brought that sensibility to Sonos Sound Suites, an immersive listening experience held at The Conservatory in Shanti Nagar, Bengaluru, where the emphasis on high-end audio was mirrored as a natural fit for his music. He performed a solo set alongside a collaboration with singer-songwriter Sahana Naresh adding Hindustani classical vocal elements.
For Sakré, these curator-led listenership events are where his music breathes best. “My music requires an audience who come with an open mind. They curated people from various fields who were already inclined towards listening — so I was in the right setting where my music also becomes part of that experience.”
Sakre with Sahana Naresh
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement
The composer who looms largest over Sakré’s reference palette is Ilaiyaraaja. “Raja Sir has pushed a lot of boundaries, and his soundscape has defined the entirety of South Indian cinema,” he says.
Beyond Ilaiyaraaja, he names Kannada composers such as Vijay Anand. “Some of the older songs from the ‘70s and ‘80s had interesting harmonisation happening within the composition itself. I’d maybe pick two or four bars, that is how it has been.”
His approach to sampling is closer to the jazz tradition than a DJ. “Sampling is my voice. I chop like a beatmaker, but I reharmonise like a jazz musician. It is like Coltrane playing over ‘Fly Me to the Moon’… that’s my philosophy.”
That methodology found its most tangible expression in his beat tape Raja Has No Friends, a collection of songs that could just carry a cross-generational appeal given that a seasoned Kannadiga might pick up on some of the sonic familiarities and a hip-hop fan might just groove to the beats. Out in 2024 and 2025 in two volumes, the albums tell how nostalgia can be woven into futuristic sounds.
His most recent release, Bangalore Sonic Archives, was out in October 2025 and pushed that thinking into physical geography. It started as a social media commission from art collective Alserkal Avenue in Dubai, who gave him full access to their Instagram for a week and asked him to do what he wanted with it.
Sakré proposed sonically mapping Bangalore, from Indian Coffee House and how it was a third space for meetings and hangouts to a street musician named Narayana. The Instagram project grew into a seven-track beat tape, and then into a 160-minute audio-visual performance at BLR Hubba’s Kantha Festival in January, with visual artist Upendra doing live coding and visual sampling alongside Sakré’s set.
The audience Sakré finds most receptive tends to come from three directions. There are fellow beatmakers who regard the SP 404 as a crucial tool for lo-fi hip-hop beats and appreciate his technique. “It is a device that has a heritage and a history. A lot of fellow beatmakers actually start listening to my music because they see how it is like a blank slate; they appreciate my technique,” he says.
Then, there are listeners drawn in by the emotional charge of the samples themselves. “Every sound has a certain place in our heart, right?” he asks. Lastly, there are those who arrive through recognising the film songs, initially assuming that what they are hearing is a remix. “But I wouldn’t call them remixes. I don’t take the hook exactly. I take smaller samples and reharmonise them,” he clarifies.
Coming up, Sakré is planning re-releases of earlier beats, this time with hip-hop artistes and rappers who have already been writing verses over his instrumentals. He is also putting the finishing touches on a Hindi electronica album called Rozi Roti with longtime collaborator Jitesh Jadwani, his bandmate in Droolfox who also makes music under the moniker Galat Admi.
In the meantime, he continues to be a go-to collaborator for the likes of Sahana Naresh and the Vasu Dixit Collective. “These collaborations have happened on a very human level,” he says. In the age of rapidly churned out digital music, Sakré adds more humanness to music production, taking things apart and putting them back together to arrive at refreshing tracks.
Published – March 25, 2026 09:50 pm IST
