Category: Interviews

Some of the most recognisable Nigerian records of the last decade carry his fingerprints, even if his name doesn’t come up first. Uyo Meyo. 1 Milli. Seven tracks on About 30. Bakare Michael Seyifunmi has spent years shaping the sound behind the sound, working as composer, producer, arranger and music director across some of the…

Richard Vedelago, art curator and gallery owner, surprisingly didn’t start out in art. He built his career in real estate and hospitality before he ever picked up a curatorial title, and it shows in the way he talks about culture now, less like a gallerist and more like someone laying infrastructure. Under the Windsor Group,…

By day, she’s behind a strategy deck. By night, she’s behind the decks. Bunmi has built a name for herself as a true multi-hyphenate: a corporate professional who refuses to be boxed into one identity, and a DJ whose open-format sets blend Afrobeats, Afro-House, 3-Step, and Amapiano into genre-defying mixes that keep dance floors guessing.…

Ifeme C.S. does not fit neatly into one box, and he is not trying to. He is a filmmaker, music producer, DJ and event organiser, and the order in which those things happened matters. Film came first: music videos, commercials, photography, the whole visual world. Then lockdown happened, the shoots dried up, and with nothing…

Meet IYS, short for Incredible Young Star. If you haven’t heard the name yet, he’s the fresh sound currently taking over your airwaves and, quite literally, the new wave in your earbuds. Driven by a childhood belief that he could be the main character in his own story, IYS blends a deep-seated love for music…

Ojurereoluwa Osemudiame Amos introduces himself in two sentences. “My name is Ojurere, and I’m a musician. I am also an introvert.” It is the most efficient self-description you will hear from a 21-year-old who plays drums, piano and saxophone, writes his own songs, produces his own beats, and can engineer his own records entirely by…

How did three different artists join forces to become a single, dominant force in Nigeria’s electronic music revolution? It started, as most good things, with community. Around 2019, Jamie Black, Sigag Lauren, and Calix began noticing something forming around them: a real movement of people who loved dance music. They found each other in that…

Saelem has never known a version of himself without music pouring out of him. He has been singing since he was eight years old, in the church choir he still performs in to this day. But the music that the world began to hear started somewhere specific: in grief. In 2020, after suffering a loss,…

Most people know the feeling Timothee speaks of, where things are moving and life looks fine from the outside, but somewhere underneath, something does not sit quite right. You have probably always known what it is, but knowing something and facing it are two different things, and it is easier to keep going than to…

DJ Khalipha is not what you would expect, in that he doesn’t seem like his music. The music is fast and feverish, built on a tempo that doesn’t give you time to think. The person behind it speaks slowly, carefully, with the measured politeness of someone who was raised to be decent and has not…