Tell me about it If Steven Umoh’s voice sounds unusually knowing, prematurely wise, Thames inflections bleeding into his native Nigerian accent, anchored between rapping and singing, then that’s because he’s lived a lot of life in his 27 years. Born in Calabar, a port city in the south of Nigeria, he moved to London aged 17, then Norwich aged 19, and it was in Norwich that he would become Obongjayar, finding his creative feet. Now, without having released a full album, Umoh’s stock amongst his peers couldn’t be higher. As well as working with people like Giggs, Sampha and Ibeyi, he collaborated with Kamasi Washington on XL label boss Richard Russell’s debut solo record, on the track ‘She Said’. Speaking about the impact of Obongjayar’s work on his own, King Krule explained, “if I wanted to encapsulate something, he has done it for me. When I see his stuff, I’m like, damn that’s fucking amazing.” Obongjayar’s music is hard to define, pitched at a kind of electronic Afrobeat minimalism. Across three EPs – Home, Basse and now Which Way is Forward – Obongjayar has taken ideas from downtempo hip-hop, new soul, electronica, even ambient. All gates are open. Where last year’s Bassey was focused on the women in his life and how he related to them, Which Way is Forward deals with his most serious subject matter so far: the personal, the political, the spiritual. The EP is, he explains, “a mirror that allows you to look inward, to understand trauma, to heal.” “One of the first things I bought was a bootleg Fela Kuti CD” I was always into music but never had the opportunity to grow up around it or even actively go out and buy it. I was just listening to stuff that was around. I wasn’t actively listening to music; it was very passive for me when I was growing up. I wasn’t super into anything; it was just stuff that my uncle would play in the car or stuff that I’d hear on the radio or whatnot. It was just like American hip-hop, predominantly that and a little bit of Afrobeat. Then I bought that bootleg Fela Kuti CD from the local music shop, and that was when I thought I was actively trying to get into listening to music. But that just came and went. I was 13, 14 at the time and it was just cool. It didn’t really have any impact on me at the time – I just thought it was cool. I knew I wanted to make music but at that point I wasn’t really trying, or thinking about it in that sense, I just wanted to be exposed to something that was relatable to where I was from. “Moving to Norwich was when I really found what I wanted to” My mum moved to London, and moving to be with my mum and getting an education for myself was why we left Nigeria. I moved to Norwich just because I wanted to be independent of my mum; I wanted to go somewhere else. I felt that the lifestyle I was trying to live in London… it wasn’t who I was and I wanted to get away from it and start again. Didn’t want to go to university in London because that thing would have continued and I wanted a fresh start. I went to the art school in Norwich to study graphic design and that’s where I met my closest friends, who opened my eyes to a lot of things musically and culture-wise. I dabbled in recording when I was in Nigeria but when I moved to the UK that
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