AKA Coby-Sohukwu in the studio

Coby Sey is one to watch. Coby Sey is one to listen to. Coby Sey came to visit.

Coby travelled from London to spend some days and nights with us in Port Harcourt.

We’re working together on First World Problems, an eccentric digital collaboration connecting our grassroots community media collective in Port Harcourt, Nigeria’s oil capital, with a UK-based arts collective, a digital radio station in London with deep community roots and established musicians and sound artists internationally. In the studio, on the street, online, we are making and gathering sounds and music. Coby will weave together song, wild sound, dialogue and testimony, effects and audio archive into a rich critical soundscape, a digital dialogue between the streets of London and Port Harcourt’s dense informal settlements. This project explores the way the pandemic has exacerbated pre-existing inequalities similar in these two otherwise seemingly disparate cities.

We spent most of our time together in the music studio, but one afternoon we piled into the radio studios. Here’s the noise and nonsense we made.

Crew in the house: Truth Amoni presenting, singing and shaking; Miebaka Kienabere singing sweetly and producing madly; Trust Amoni (yes, they’re twins) on another mic; Denny Tunez on the guitar; Benjamin Bright on the cajon; Odagga and Yung Crown freestyling; Dre on the little egg shaker; Promise riding the faders; and Imanny with a camera. Oh, and Coby Sey. It was hot in there!