Faaathom

Artist

A fathom is a nautical unit of measurement equal to about six feet, which is just enough water to go over most people’s heads. But if you allow yourself to relax and go with the flow, you float instead of drowning. This is what Malik Cumberbatch had in mind as a tenth grader when he chose Faaathom as his stage name.
“I remember very, very, vividly. I was in English class and the teacher passed out a vocabulary sheet,” he recalls. “I saw the word fathom and I don't know why I liked it so much. I guess it was just the way it sounded. I looked it up and I discovered that it's a unit for measurement, but it also means to understand. It clicked because I wanted to make deeper music that people can understand.” The 24-year-old Pittsburgh resident lives up to the name with thoughtful yet relatable lyrics and a propensity to dig beneath the surface past tired subject matter and overused sounds and flows.
Faaathom’s love of music started as a small child when he and his family lived in Atlanta for a period, and he couldn’t go anywhere without hearing Sean Kingston’s massive hit “Beautiful Girls.” Before he knew it, he couldn’t get the syrupy pop tune out of his head. “Now I look back and understand it's probably the melody of it. That was the first song I was actually singing, like trying to figure out how to make it sound right. And I just locked on.”
That love of melody was lasting, and he began making music of his own at age 12. It also carried on into high school and adulthood, informing his approach to music as an artist and producer. “I make music that you don’t have to understand right away, but you will catch the melody,” says the Harrisburg, PA native. “You focus on that for the first four or five listens and then you're actually digging on what I'm saying.”
Though he’s always loved music, drawing inspiration from artists like Drake, Tyler the Creator, Kid Cudi, Eminem, and Earl Sweatshirt, he only started taking it really seriously a couple of years ago. Before he devoted his creative energy to music, he had dreams of attending MIT and getting into video game development. However, as he approached the end of his high school career, the pull of music was enough to keep him from college, but not enough to inspire the work ethic he needed to get where he wanted to be musically.
“I told my mom I didn’t want to do college because I want to do music but I really wasn't working hard enough to justify that [at the time].” During this limbo period, a missed opportunity gave him the final push to put his money where his mouth is. “A co-worker let me borrow his microphone for like six months. And in that period, I used it probably four or five times,” he recalls. Eventually, his co-worker, a musician in his own right, needed his microphone back to record his own music. The reality of what had just happened settled in. “I was looking back at it, and I said to myself ‘you had that incredible piece of equipment right there, and now it's gone because he needed it back. And now you cannot make as high a quality of music as you want to make.” It was at that moment he decided to invest in himself.
In May 2020, Faaathom purchased a mic and his own recording set up and genuinely focused on his craft. “I would say in the last two years is where I really decided, well, I'm not doing
anything else and I'm good as hell at this. I need to figure this out. Since then, I’ve probably created 150 songs. It's just been work.” And the work has been paying off. He’s making his own beats, refining his process, and cracking the code of true artistry. "I'll play a beat and whatever kind of emotion that evokes the melody will come out. I think I always will start with the beat because the beat is the canvas and I can't just throw paint anywhere without seeing what kind of canvas I have.” The results are the best music of his career.
The next step for Faaathom is to share some of his new output with the world, but he won’t be alone. The business end of his musical enterprise is a family affair. He co-founded the independent label Notorious Muzik with his father, and his mother is part of his management team. For Faaathom, family is everything. “My family kept me afloat in different ways at different times,” says the rapper-producer. But with his new sense of focus and purpose keeping him from swimming against his own current, Faaathom is relaxed with his head above the water and floating all on his own.