As the average piece of recorded music has gotten louder, wilder, and everything-er in the digital era, sound collages have blossomed. The 2020s have been full of young artists whose brains were rewired by E+E, Chuquimamani-Condori’s early alias for sputtering patchworks of Latin electronica, and revel in semioblitz bliss. This music isn’t about overload or unholy collisions for the sake of it; it’s bound together by an autobiographical thread, where the disparate sounds intentionally express elements of their ideology and reveal something about the way they experience the world. They’re channeling the private anxieties, joys, and memories of their communities—be it Venezuelan teens pining for a better future, alienated queer kids, or young Black friends.
Among this generation’s finest is a 20-year-old computer science and fashion design student named Chidi Obialo, or heavensouls. He’s in a duo with his buddy stickerbush called the Sidepeices. Their breakout project was last year’s Darkskin Niggas With Lightskin Problems. Call it a virtuous data dump: It’s hectic IDM (Intimate Discord Memories) by two sincere shitposters who’ve been on the internet long enough to know exactly how to skewer it. One song, “Fuck a Stimulus I Need My Shit in Blood,” was themed around mocking a Hasan Piker stan. This year, heavensouls dropped westside trapped, a showcase of plundersymphonic finesse and a tribute to Nigerian beats. His new album-length EP, cantu of the sower, merges these musical tabs into a collage of collages. He’s applying the dizzy logic of free jazz to shivery microsounds and making horn- and string-accompanied compositions for the conservatory freaks to dance to.
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Obialo has lived a peripatetic life, from growing up in Nigeria, being unhoused at one point, to moving to the suburbs and becoming hyperliterate in niche genres via internet forums. The record sounds like he’s expelling a lifetime’s worth of moving between digital and physical rabbit holes. The nearly nine-minute “today is my favorite” is a monument to motion, heaving and sighing like a windstream carrying thousands of tiny pearls. There are rippling gasps, drums, strings, sax, a vaguely Latin guitar, a sample of a woman talking about getting her hair done. Obialo silences certain layers while modulating others, nestling rhythms like honeycombs. After maybe 10,000 individual motes of noise that chatter like mouse clicks, the song ends with a slow, jangly fadeout. These sounds are strange bedfellows, but the delirium rarely feels indulgent or trivial. It’s optimized for wistful beauty, like a fried cousin of upsammy’s plinky pastoralism that wants to soothe and electrify at the same time. It feels like new emotional terrain—a kind of serene garden watered into being atop a life thronged with stimuli.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
