Interview and Photos by Matt Sonzala
Last time I was with you, I was in Lagos, Nigeria, and I know you live there but what is your connection to London?
It’s great to be back with you again. London is a place I spent a lot of time as a child. I was born in London actually and moved back to Nigeria when I was like one. I spent a lot of time living between London and Lagos. Pre-teens, teens, it’s one of the formative places where I got into the production of music. Appreciating a scene, yeah I was at that age when I was in London where you could check stuff out, finding music that I like.
Your music is not one dimensional. It has traditional elements of course but you can hear a lot of influences in your music.
Definitely and I think that speaks to how London operates as a city. The multi-layered facets of the different people, different walks of life, different socio-economy, different religions and all of that lends to different creative expressions. Especially in the immigrant community, as I understand a bit better now, immigrants whether it’s African immigrants or Polish immigrants or Indian immigrants, we are all second generation so we will now take a bit of what the UK has as our foster parents and what we have as our biological parents and we start making these new offspring. So that’s what I have come to realize with this sound.
And the sound system culture is crazy in London. It’s crazy you walk out your door and someone has a sound system in a square by your house.
THAT! Whether it’s the bigger roll outs of sound systems like Carnival or places like Gillett Square that exist now, even just the barbers, even just going down Tottenham High Road, there’s different barbers at a certain time, the amount of music that will be wafting out of places, it all adds up to it.
Do you see that in Lagos as well? Because the scene in Nigeria right now is so huge and amazing, but is it something that really came out of the streets or the community? I know it was happening before we all got to hear it.
Definitely, there’s still micro scenes happening, let alone something like my scene, the Afro Electronic scene, there’s SA Three Step, there’s Street Beat, Zanku from Zlatan, Naira Marley and the Marlins, Small Doctor, SK on D Beat, there’s a lot of uptempo music in the scene. The actual essence of where it comes from is the Molue, transit bus conductors, from the street boys of Agege, the Agberos, the 10k Area Boys, who are just dancing on the road, yeah that’s still existing alongside Afro Juju, Fuji, Apala, Hi-Life, Juju Music, Afrobeat and Afrobeats, I think it’s quite honest for the expansion of it.
Would you say that “Area 10K Boys Riddim” was your break out?
Yeah 10K Area Boys, yes I would definitely say that. Because that was 100% independent, just put up online and then from that I garnered some attention and got to do some more remixes so yeah that was very different from anything I made prior in a way. That was definitely like ok, this is the direction we’re now going in.
That was the first song I heard from you and I think it came out at a time before Afrobeats was blowing up all over the world. You had your own sound and it was around that time where I started seeing what’s now the present world of music but then it was the future.
Well then it was a glint in the eye, a little glint in somebodys eye but there was definite space for expression. So “10k Area Boys” which was kind of like an Afro Breakbeat record in a way. There was nothing I had to tilt my opinion on what that should be made to sound like because there was nothing else going on, there was no label, it was just making a new expression in a way. Also I think the video really helped for that because that was something you maybe won’t see again in that way because that was the Arab Spring, that was those demonstrations, the Occupy Lagos, Occupy New York, Occupy London, that was filmed at our own Occupy Lagos, so even the charge, I don’t know if we will see it like that again. I don’t know if they will let people demonstrate in that way again. It was all very peaceful.
When I was in Lagos I met a lot of people who told me that there was a lot of crossover between London and Lagos, people came here for school and lots of people even told me that they had been to Houston. Both those cities came up a lot. What you are doing with mixing all the styles, do you think that a lot of people have brought sounds back to Lagos to their trips to London or abroad in general? How does Lagos react to music that is outside of the mainstream?
Well it depends, right? I remember there were definite times where it’s been that nobody wants to hear techno, but now we have Afro Tech. We have an actual space for it. So it’s an evolution. It took something like, to be honest the pandemic, when everybody had a chance to sit down and the clubs were closed so the underground now got its time to shine, as we were finding places to link up and the underground Djs were the ones who had the space like the warehouses and they had the mailing lists for that and it got fed through. So there was quite a big jump from “10k Area Boys” to when we met to the pandemic to now when you have Obi’s House going on in New York which is more Afrobeats, you still have weekend festivals for EDM for want of a better word, happening in Lagos. People camping on the weekend, raving in the morning, I mean there is an event coming up called Echoes which is all just Minimal Tech. So sometime I might soon be considered Pop, because people are taking it even more deep. I’ll never be considered Pop, I’m joking, but it’s going to where we want it to go, further than we could imagine it could go. That’s been something. Even before I came on this trip to London, I had some emails from other people in the scene who are doing writing camps now. I just missed an electronic music writing camp in Lagos that just happened. There will be a compilation that’s gonna come off the back of that. So it’s an exciting time.
Also Lagos and London are two of the biggest cities in the world, so there has to be a level of diversity when you have that many people and different scenes.
For the fact as well that Nigerians are everywhere. Like, you’ve been around the world I’m sure you run into Nigerians in the most unsuspecting places. I’ve run into Nigerians in South Korea, so I think we’re diverse. I say that to say that we are already open to being diverse because we will go to places. I think creatively we now have to follow the same trajectory. The same way we’re logistically diverse, the same thing creatively now that it feels safer to go everywhere, now you are going to hear a lot more sounds of people traveling sonically the same way they have been traveling physically.
We came up in the States in an era of street rappers selling their tapes and CD’s out the trunk, it was all about physical product. I know that in Lagos, a big place to find music whether it’s legit or bootleg was in the markets. Whether it was CD’s or USB’s you could find all the big music in the street markets. How are people in Nigeria consuming music today? What is the main platform in Nigeria? Is it streaming like everywhere else or are people still buying the USBs and CDs?
I think it’s a cross section. It’s interesting to note that yes there is still a big CD market. I guess it depends on the artist. You’re gonna get Rema’s project you’re gonna hit the big DSP’s but if you are going for maybe an Ayouba or an older artist or an Evergreen artist, Evergreen artists all the Evergreen artists will release across as many platforms as possible. Some of them don’t actually hit the DSPs, some of them are still just CDs. For the DJs for the Afrobeats for the Amapiano scene, it’s USB sticks you can buy from the market and they come preloaded with everything you need. I think that’s more of the best pitch for the people selling it. For the marketeers, for the guys in the market they feel like nobodies gonna come and buy one DVD, nobodies got disc players, and since DJ culture has exploded so much in Nigeria that’s replaced the bands because Nigerians we have parties all the time. Naming ceremony, wedding ceremony, engagement, funeral, Mummy’s 50th, there is always something happening all the time. Just accolades, and in the past the music was generated by the bands, they would come. As with anything now, with the budgets now it’s the DJ coming. Not that the DJ takes over the band, but the DJ has got to be sort of your Top 40 type DJ so you have to play Fela, maybe to Wasiu to maybe to Shina Peters. And that’s where the USB comes in more.
Nigeria has such an incredible musical history and lineage. Does the new generation of artists appreciate the legends like Fela Kuti and Ebeneezer Obey and people like this?
100%. Across the board, from Afrobeats there is an obvious connection to the older, the Evergreen artists. But even the younger breed of electronic artists who are doing remixes you see a chunk of the remixes are taken from older Nigerian samples and lots of the music is still played very, very much. Ebeneezer Obey is still out there, still making records so yes. I think that maybe with electronic music there is such a sample culture so we have to go back to find samples so we go back. The 80’s in Nigeria seemed to be more Afro Juju to Afro Pop so I don’t hear a lot of that being sampled, but the 70’s yeah. And you still have the younger Kuti’s who are active in the music industry collaborating at the same time so that really helps I think.
Was there ever any controversy with the music being called Afrobeats? From the classic Afrobeat? Because I always thought that was a little strange.
No. I’m sure there is somewhere online where someone says how or why they coined it that way. But no not really there hasn’t been.
What kind of crossover did you see growing up between London and Lagos? Back in the day when you would come here and turn on the radio you would hear music way different from what you would hear in Lagos I would assume.
I mean to be honest for me since I was so young really then, there’s a certain age where you start picking what you hear when you turn the radio on yourself. Lots of your life you are walking into a room and there is a radio dial that has been turned already, so in terms of that for me there was no correlation. Because what I used to listen to or what was on in my house was everything from the BBC World Service to just typical Nigerian radio so then there was stuff like Motown playing a lot. There was Shina Peters, Fela, Crystal Cortese was on the radio. We had our own versions, I think the crossover I would say was when hip hop started to come a bit. Because then we had shows like Kessing Sheen or Limca Dancing Sundays which were a version of Soul Train, but for me by the time I got to the UK, because I was in Lagos well into my teens, it was Jungle that I first heard. I somehow ended up niche in a way. I had heard Jungle before a bit from a friend in Nigeria and I was just mesmerized by this thing I had never heard anything like before. So when I got to London I was trying to find it, I went looking for something in fact.
Were people importing that music back? I assume American hip hop became mainstream, but what about the UK Hip Hop?
No I had no awareness of that then. I mean I’m sure the big bands like Soul II Soul would have been crossing over. I would hear my sisters talking about places like the Africa Center and then there was the School of African Studies as well and I think Soul II Soul used to do parties there. I think it was that Pan African connection that did it for the music in those days. But yeah people take back what they listen to. We are not the first wave of people doing electronic music. People like Afrologic and you see artists like Adebantu who has had different guises in different places. He is bridging the gap. Now he is more Yoruba on his records but he is multi-lingual. He speaks German and he speaks English and he’s rapping, so this concept has been going for a while.
I know Adebantu was one of the architects in German Hip Hop back in the day.
And he is one of the architects in bridging the Evergreen with the modern live Afro elements. You know?
Have you seen a change in attitude towards Nigerian music? This has to be a pretty prideful moment for Nigerian music right now. African music in general. I have waited a long time for the clubs in America to care about African music and now Afrobeats and Amapiano are dominating in some markets. I hear some traditional DJs even complain that now they have to play Afrobeats in their sets. Do Nigerians understand just how much they have taken over?
Yeah. Defo. It’s not an overnight success. If you look at when Kanye came to do the record with Don Jazzy and D’banj you know everybody thought that that was the moment, but no that was just a moment. We have had so many bigger moments since then. And in actual terms of not someone just coming and going but to catch a vibe and take it somewhere else to show the people what they saw in Africa, it’s actually the African scene going into the world. Afrobeats to the World is the bumper sticker. So I think there’s definitely awareness of it because it resonates so loud and we can feel the effects not just from the world but from our neighbors. When you go to Ghana, when you go to Benin, when you go to Sierra Leone, across to the other coast, to Kenya to Zanzibar, they are running the tunes. Nigerian artists are touring Africa and playing stadiums. So even that is already something that we are carrying with pride. I think it’s amazing, there’s been centuries of people going to see the opera and they don’t understand Italian, so it’s amazing to see people singing Yoruba and they don’t know every word but the passion is there.
You have two full albums?
Yes two full albums as Ekiti Sound yeah. Abeg No Vex from 2019 and Drum Money from 2023. Before that I was producing under the name The Clown Prince and then Mischief Makers, so I have always been a producer/artist. At times I spend more time producing and before that I was doing audio post production. I was doing film work at Pinewood Studios. Ekiti Sound was a sort of coming of age for me. This is what makes sense, this is my gumbo, this makes sense for me. I can do Ekiti Sound anywhere. It’s very much my natural resonance. Whereas as a producer you have to put yourself in different spaces. I’ve done Grime, Hip Hop, Drum and Bass, and you work with other people and work within where their intentions lay. But I get to do Ekiti Sound pretty much in a vacuum and can make records for myself and my friends.
What’s next for you?
For me the second wave of promoting Drum Money, we have a remix pack coming out. And three new videos coming out and I’m cooking up album three already. And I am working on a soundtrack for a graphic novel. And I’m on the radio every week on The Beat FM which I’m really pleased about. I started out on Hot FM in Nigeria, so I have the space to play these records, these Afrotech records, these 125 bpm records that’s not Amapiano and just letting the audience know that there is a community and we are servicing you. Now I’ve moved over to The Beat which is one of the biggest stations in Nigeria, but playing from their London station so we can start warming up the diaspora before they come home. It’s been a real blessing. The show is every Wednesday 9-11 pm (Lagos/London time) and you can listen online at BeatFMLondon1036.com or if you are in London you can tune in on FM. And then once a month I’m on Oroko Radio. They are kind of like Worldwide FM, an online radio station based out of Accra, Ghana and they have a very interesting list of DJs who they program.
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