Composer and DJ Bradley Miller, popularly known by cktrl, has made a career for himself soundtracking all kinds of live events, ranging from Boiler Room sets to Dior Shows. Now he’s making music for himself. cktrl has fully shifted from London’s favorite club kid to embracing being the radically refined musician he’s always been. On September 19th, he will release his next album, Spirit, a blend of jazz, neo-classical, and ambient sound. This music isn’t designed for raving or cracking the Billboard Top 100; cktrl is skilled on the clarinet and saxophone and he made an instrumental music made for living, absorbing, and becoming symbiotic with.
“When music is free from lyrics, you can really just send it yourself [based] on your own experiences,” Miller told Complex. “Spirit is about you. It’s about being more intentional, and every time that you've leaned on yourself to get through something. My dream for my music is for it to allow people to center themselves.”
cktrl released the album’s first single, "Balance," back in July. The track build to a swelling climax, shaped by cktrl’s transformative production, accented with staggered guitar picking and violins, and subtly grounded in his classical clarinet training. cktrl says Spirit is about the multitudes of life, and creating the space through sound to take them on. But while we wait, Miller’s gifted us with a curated playlist to close our Complex Summer. On a sharp pivot, cktrl gives us a dancehall-heavy playlist called “rich badness,” which, if you’re wondering, is just “like a side road at carnival.”
Listen to Complex Summers presented by @complexinprint with cktrl now on Spotify. And read our interview with him below.
You had a really quick ascension as a DJ. You were working at the record shop, and then you had the NTS show, and then you played a Boiler Room when you were 17 years old in 2012. You were in a lot of these sought-after, predominantly white club spaces. Then you see this very sharp pivot. What was the thinking around making that shift away from these spaces?
To tell the truth, trying to find ourselves and our voice and how we can speak on certain things, you can't really articulate it when you're younger. There were so many things that I was chasing at different times that I thought made sense, but it just wasn't true to me in a way like things are now. I didn't really have a clear vision of what I wanted to say. I just knew that I could make beats, write songs, so I just kind of put that together and put it in the world. I never really put out what I felt was my best work at the time. And then I think the shift really happened in the pandemic because none of that club stuff was happening, and everything was shut down.
I think when Robyn [cktrl’s last album] came around, I didn't have to worry about all of that stuff because I was the main focus and I never put myself forward as an artist like that before that project.
I took everything else offline that was out prior to that. Iit felt like the right thing to do by being the focal point of everything. I want to put things out again or rework them because they're still a part of my story. They just came at a time when I couldn't articulate my story properly.
cktrl stands for “Can't Keep to Reality.” What's the significance of that phrase?
My friend came up with it. We've been friends since we were five. I suppose anytime things have happened with music, we've kind of always been there together. When it comes to making something or finishing something, I still run it by him now.
You just released your first piece of music in the past three years, and that's your single “Balance.” What has that experience been like?
It’s a dream to be honest. It just feels good to share music again and help people. So far the feedback's just been about putting people in a better mood or healing people from what they're going through day-to-day. The music has helped me a lot through different things.
In the past you've mentioned re-releasing some of your earlier work. Is that still something that you're interested in doing?
Honestly, this year I've made the most music ever since I was probably 17. I just feel really locked in at the moment, so it can go anywhere. It's just about timing. I want to put out bodies of work that make sense and have their own moment, and then do the next one. So I wouldn't say there's no possibility of anything, but anything goes really. That's still going to happen at some point.
You grew up in inner city South London, and you had an opportunity to learn clarinet and saxophone through the free music lessons that were funded by your local council. Can you talk about that experience?
I couldn't have done it without it. A lot of people don't get to finish college or schooling, or get really far in the education system because of the constraints on households. Whether it be a mortgage, rent, or even getting loans, we have a lot of things stacked against us on a systematic level that kind of stops us from getting further. I think the most important thing for young people everywhere is just access. Resources. I wouldn't have been able to learn the instruments [otherwise]. I probably would've still done production because we could all get cracked versions of programs and bootleg versions of VFTs or whatever to be able to make stuff—make sound on a computer. Having access to these kinds of programs changes the trajectory. Because you had an instrument, you can make music and have a career that way, or you could teach, or you could do something else that hasn't got you around white people 24/7 in a corporate job or somewhere else. You can have your own time and be self-sufficient in a way that you wouldn't have been able to otherwise.
I've done kind of everything in terms of working full time and doing a proper corporate nine to five. It drags you. It gets down on you because you're not around people of your likeness. The majority of your time. You're around people at work more than you are your family. So if art can inform your world, then you get to be around more people like you, and you can have just better experiences day to day. I think without that initial access, I wouldn't be able to live the life that I live now.
Your background is Jamaican and Montserratian, both have strong communities in London. How has your West Indian culture and community impacted your art?
When it comes to my production, it's always at the core, and not necessarily, in the most obvious way, it's more like a frequency thing. It's the way a lot of Caribbean music is mixed. There's this space between the bass and the higher frequencies; I preserve that throughout all of my music now. And also just the attitude of Jamaica. Masculinity is so high in Jamaica—no one's trying to follow. It's that energy all the time, and I feel like that's why I've been able to be so strong, have so much conviction with what I'm doing, and not worry about what anyone else is doing because that's just not how we are as people. To be Jamaican. You are original.
You've done a lot of work overlapping into fashion—DJing, soundtracking— you’ve worked with Bianca Saunders, Priya Ahluwalia, Virgil Abloh. What does that kind of collaboration look like?
Virgil was a really special guy, rest his soul. I've never known someone who's just so tapped into so many things all at once. Even just him being aware of the work was crazy.
How did he become aware of your work?
In London, we just got a community here. Day to day, I'm either listening to dancehall, my friend's music, or stuff that I've been working on. So I think just from that way of life is how it all kind of went about. I used to DJ at this nightclub called Deviation, run by Benji B, and I met Virgil there because he was always doing things with Benji. He was already aware of the production and different things because of a guy called Judah, [and] just like our little London scene.
When I worked with Virgil, we did Off-White, so there were a couple of my tracks in one of the [runway] shows.
What was it like being able to experience the tracks in that kind of setting?
Amazing. People being able to experience the music anywhere is obviously positive, but I think what it allowed me to do after—most things are affiliations, recommendations, co-sign. If you get those, even in a small degree, it helps. It’s one thing having access to be able to learn a craft, but once you do that, to maintain yourself in this life, you rely on someone saying that you're good to someone else or someone else discovering you.
For Priya [Ahluwalia] and Saul Nash[: a London Connection], that was fun because that was a new thing for them as well, because they couldn't put on any shows. We were under very different circumstances, because of lockdown, but because of that, there was more freedom in how the music brief could be. I could just do me, and they were happy for me to. It was the same when I did the Dior Tears capsule collection in Egypt. I'd never experienced anything like that before. That was on a whole other level. I had full creative freedom on that.
Having all of those things in fashion allows me to keep food on the table because without the fashion side of things and branding, sometimes there isn't any income, especially if you're doing music that is very honest or true and could be looked at as left or whatever. If you're not making pop music, you might not see such a return from that initially. Fashion very much accelerated the opportunities. I think a lot of people don't realize that, other than celebrities getting invited to sit front row, the people that aren't celebrities in front row are very well regarded in their fields. You'll get a crazy painter, or a sculptor, or architect. When you get “heard” in that space, they might be doing an installation, and ask you to do the sound for it. Those are where those opportunities come from.
It's interesting that you are drawing attention to the fact that vulnerable work doesn't always have that direct correlation to income, especially in this iteration of art and culture that we have right now, which is so driven by capital and consumption.
Usually, it's the other way around—people compromise integrity for income—whereas I get to do it the other way around. That's the beauty of the collaborations. I've kind of changed my perspective on what the cons are for me. It’s more about getting the music to more people. When I think about older artists, like Teddy Pendergrass, for example, the diaspora was more locked in with what Black artists were doing in different areas in the past. Whereas now, there are all kinds of people doing Black music in some way.
Unless it's on the algorithm or being said to people in a certain way, they're not really that tapped in. The dream is just to be that now and show that, whoever it is in youth culture or Black culture right now, if you need a reset or reprise, you've had a hard week, you need to just put on what I'm putting out. That's what we're striving for.
Can we expect more music?
The [next] album is called Spirit. Spirit is about you. It’s about being more intentional, and every time that you've leaned on yourself to get through something. My dream for my music is for it to allow people to center themselves. With music that has words and lyrics, it's like you're trying to relate as best you can to what that person went through and try and apply it to your own life. But when music is free from lyrics, you can really just send it yourself on your own experiences. Whether that is a mental thing or even more of a spiritual thing, how we find spirit to get through and navigate the shit that we have to deal with.