CHINO AMOBI with JASON SHARP, KAIE KELLOUGH, KEVIN LO and TANYA EVENSON at 918 Bathurst as part of X AVANT NEW MUSIC FESTIVAL XII, Friday (October 13), 8 pm. $10-$17, festival pass $50. musicgallery.org.
Even at a young age, Chino Amobi was fascinated with building different worlds. Growing up in Richmond, Virginia, the then-seven-year-old and his brother would create their own stations by taping songs off the radio, adding DJ drops and their own music.
“We would pitch up our vocals and make it our own show,” recalls the experimental producer and co-founder of record label NON Worldwide. “In a way, I was doing what I’m still doing now. It’s still the same vibe.”
On his debut album, PARADISO, released earlier this year on NON, similarly fictitious jingles puncture Amobi’s apocalyptic collages of garage rock, industrial noise, rap and spoken word poetry. Inspired by both pirate stations unencumbered by government regulations and the idea of radio as what he calls a “design container,” the producer employs ID tags as a portal into his chaotic, free-form compositions.
“I like to draw people into a space and then disorient or destabilize within that space,” he explains. “Open them up to new channels or places where they can receive new information, because otherwise they might have been closed to it.”
The Nigerian-American artist is no stranger to confronting audiences with harsh sonics and even harsher realities. Last year’s Brian Eno-referencing Airport Music For Black Folk was a claustrophobic soundtrack for post-9/11 terminals, while a collaborative EP, Izlämic Europe, with Houston producer Rabit merged discordant sounds including gunshots, flying planes and female Arabic singers. Amobi also appears on fellow experimentalists Yves Tumor and Dedekind Cut’s genre-traversing 2016 mixtape, Trump$America.
The producer is the perfect centrepiece for this week’s X Avant festival. The 12th edition of the Music Gallery’s new music festival runs till October 15, and its theme is resistance, a concept Amobi has frequently explored in his own songs and the music released by NON Worldwide, the label he co-founded in 2015 with South African performance artist Angel-Ho and London-based Congolese musician Nkisi.
The African and Afrodiasporic collective’s mission is to use sound to articulate “visible and invisible structures that create binaries in society, and in turn distribute power.” Their merch features all-caps slogans like “EXORCISE THE LANGUAGE OF DOMINATION” and “NON IS A HAMMER WE USE TO CRUSH THE ENEMY.”
While NON’s combination of label, radical art project and “borderless state” might sound like a lot to wrap your head around, Amobi is interested in the tension between opposing ideas that can’t easily be reconciled.
“That’s the nature of life in itself, I think,” he says.
At its core, though, NON is about finding like-minded acts pushing to “decolonize the dance floor.”
“There’s a certain sonic language when somebody’s really trying to challenge preconceived ideas of what it is to be an African artist or make African music,” Amobi says, “and that’s what we’re into putting out there.
“For me, resistance means doing what you think you need to do regardless of what the majority is doing, keeping true to yourself, approaching things critically, making informed decisions and working with people who you feel are doing that as well.”
To wit, PARADISO feels like a family gathering, with Amobi enlisting the voices of fellow NON affiliates Nkisi and FAKA, Latinx producer Elysia Crampton, trans model Aurel Haize Odogbo and others to bring his world to life. The album cover, designed by Free At Last, shows a fake passport with Amobi’s picture. It’s another example of how he uses familiar artifacts as tools to spread his messages.
Although he’s vague about NON’s upcoming projects, hinting at a Teen Vogue-themed “design fiction film” and a radio station, the producer’s far less opaque when it comes to the collective’s endgame.
“Global domination,” he says without a trace of irony. “It’s not just some Ponzi, get-rich-quick scheme. We’re all in it for the long haul.”
music@nowtoronto.com | @Max_Mertens
