There’s a peculiar kind of freedom in making music that refuses to behave. Not the calculated rebellion of an artist trying to shock, but something more instinctive: the pleasure of following an idea wherever it goes, even when that means abandoning the one that came before it. For 20-year-old Nigerian-American producer Chidi Obialo, better known as heavensouls, music seems less a finished object than an endlessly expanding thought process. His latest release, cantu of the sower, makes a compelling case for never knowing when to stop.
Released through NTS Recordings, the six-track, 42-minute project operates somewhere between free jazz, experimental hip-hop, glitch electronics and the more unruly corners of internet music culture. Obialo, who grew up in Nigeria before relocating to the United States, has already accumulated an extensive catalogue of releases, including collaborations with stickerbush under the name Sidepeices. Yet cantu feels like a particularly ambitious attempt to bring his scattered musical interests into conversation. The result is wonderfully excessive, occasionally exhausting, and difficult to mistake for anybody else’s work. heavensouls+1
Opening track “today is my favorite” spends nearly nine minutes rearranging its own identity. Skittering percussion, elastic electronic textures, guitars and fragments of human voices tumble through a composition that seems perpetually on the verge of falling apart. Yet there’s an unexpected tenderness beneath the commotion. Melodies emerge almost accidentally, linger long enough to become familiar, then disappear into something else. It’s music that rewards attention without ever demanding that you understand its construction.
“model housing” pushes this restless sensibility further, moving between jazz-inflected passages, electronic distortion and fractured rhythms. Its title also points towards something more substantial. Obialo has spoken about the suffocating uniformity of American suburbia, and the record’s resistance to repetition begins to sound like an aesthetic answer to that experience. Against a landscape of identical houses and prescribed ways of living, he constructs a world where nothing is obliged to remain in its assigned place.
The album is at its most thrilling when contrasting impulses collide. “star balcony” channels the intricate rhythmic architecture of early IDM before opening into something more expansive, while “group working” introduces Obialo’s own vocals, half-buried beneath a frantic arrangement of percussion and saxophone. Alyssa Mandel’s saxophone contributions bring a physical looseness to music otherwise shaped by microscopic digital manipulation. On “shipping times and quiet streets,” featuring stickerbush, the pace feels less combative, allowing a surprisingly reflective atmosphere to take hold.
There are moments when Obialo’s appetite for complexity works against him. Certain passages become so densely populated that individual ideas barely have room to register. But perhaps that friction is essential to the record’s character. Its imperfections feel inseparable from its refusal to settle into an easily marketable sound.
What makes cantu of the sower interesting isn’t simply how much music Obialo manages to squeeze into forty-odd minutes. It’s his apparent indifference to the distinction between musical sophistication and impulsive experimentation. In an era when even eccentricity can become a recognizable aesthetic, heavensouls offers something less easily packaged: music that seems genuinely curious about what might happen next.
And, refreshingly, he doesn’t always appear to know the answer.
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