Sea House founder and chairman Matt Kassell sometimes finds time to make music himself. This year marks the 10th anniversary of the debut album by Matt’s nom de plume, Emker Cel.
The first album (released in August 2016) was very much a solo affair, but a band was formed to play live, and songs were quickly written for the subsequent albums From The Waves (2018) and, after an extended break for fatherhood, lockdown, and a bad dose of long covid, You Are Everything You Are (2023), which included “Understood”, a collaboration with North-East independent music heroes Field Music.
Matt has also produced, co-written and played on many other artists’ work, both on and off the Sea House label, as well as making music videos, producing compilation albums and volunteering in various roles at The Sea House.
May 2026 has seen the first new EC single in a long while, the socio-political bossa-nova “Think!”, while a compilation album of the first decade, “Emker Cel Is Ten!”, is due out this summer. He doesn’t always use exclamation marks.
But what about that moniker? “Well”, says Matt, “I got very into audiology while lecturing on a media degree, and I read about a Turkish biologist by the name of Emker Aziz, who was one of the first people to discover that our senses are entirely cell-based. His work focused particularly on the genetics of audio receptors that act as transducers that convert sound waves into electrical stimuli that can be understood by the brain. Thus, the cell responsible for this transmission is named after him: the Emker Cell. I removed the last “l” to add a layer of mystery.
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