Emeka Ogboh‘s immersive sound installations have taken him around the world to share the audible pulse of Lagos, Nigeria. It may therefore come as a surprise that the artist is only now been set to release his debut album. The five-track LP Beyond The Yellow Haze will debut on A-TON, an imprint of Berghain‘s in-house label, Ostgut Ton, on January 15th, 2021.
The legendary club’s dance floors have laid dormant since March due to COVID-19. In the absence of throngs of black-clad dancers, Studio Berlin has stood in to occupy the space. This was where the owners of Berghain’s imprint came across Ogboh’s work. His latest installation, Ayilara, expands on his work with the sounds of Africa’s most populous city, bringing visitors on an aural journey through its red-light district.
Not only were the staff of Ostgut overcome by Ogboh’s work – they were shocked to find that he didn’t fancy himself a producer and had thus never considered an album. Resident Advisor reports that Beyond The Yellow Haze will feature the sounds of the Nigerian artist’s first solo exhibition from 2018, No Condition Is Permanent. Lagos is a city that is awash in sound. Public markets, street conversations, and the din of traffic are the backdrop of the album, beautifully married with rumbling drum lines and ambient synths.
Ogboh’s work can be viewed as love notes to his city, one that he misses dearly. He normally splits his time between Germany and Nigeria, but due to COVID-19 travel restrictions has been stuck in Berlin since March. While he loves Berlin dearly, as he told TateShots in 2017, “Lagos is a city that is never silent, so when I first started living in Berlin I found it hard to sleep because it was quiet. In Lagos we live every day with, I stopped calling it noise, this is really like sound. The city composes. This really captivated me to work a lot with sound.”
Beyond The Yellow Haze is available for pre-order on the Berghain website.
