Latest news with #EverythingIsRecorded
Scoop
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scoop
Richard Russell Remixes Everything Is Recorded Under His RLr Moniker
Richard Russell steps up under his rLr alias to remix his own Everything Is Recorded project. Released via XL Recordings, the rLr remix of 'Never Felt Better' sees Russell breaking apart the original into a bass-heavy audio collage that warps and chops Sampha and Florence Welch's original vocals while beaming in legendary mixtape pioneer Kid Capri from somewhere in 1990's New York City. It's the first rLr remix in over five years, following previous remixes for the likes of Crass, Viviankrist, Ibeyi and Roots Manuva. The original 'Never Felt Better' features on Everything Is Recorded's acclaimed third album Temporary. Released in February, the album features an incredible roll call of collaborators including Sampha, Florence Welch, Bill Callahan, Noah Cyrus, Maddy Prior, Berwyn, Alabaster Deplume, Jah Wobble, Yazz Ahmed, Laura Groves, Kamasi Washington, Rickey Washington, Roses Gabor, Jack Peňate, Samantha Morton, Clari Freeman-Taylor and Nourished By Time. Created over four years from 2020 to 2024, Temporary was recorded in the main at Russell's own west London Copper House studio, alongside sessions in Tottenham, Cumbria, Dorset, Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and is set to build on previous acclaimed releases including 2018's eponymous, Mercury Prize-nominated debut album. Temporary is the first full Everything Is Recorded release in over four years but followed a prolific period of music-making for Richard Russell. As Everything Is Recorded, he released four album-length pieces via Soundcloud and Bandcamp only over the previous twelve months: Summer Solstice, Autumn Equinox, Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox. Each was recorded during extended, one-day improvised jams on the date of their respective titles at Russell's west London Copper House studio, featuring an eclectic cast of musicians and collaborators. Earlier this year, he teamed up with singer, songwriter and acclaimed actor and director Samantha Morton as musical duo SAM MORTON to release their acclaimed debut album Daffodils & Dirt. Meanwhile, he produced 'Four Kinds of Horses' from i/o, Peter Gabriel's first number one album in over 30 years, as well as this old house, the debut EP from tipped London trio Mary In The Junkyard. It was for these records, alongside previous lauded production work for the likes of Bobby Womack, Damon Albarn, Gil Scott-Heron and Ibeyi, that Russell received the prodigious Inspiration Award at last week's Music Producers Guild awards in London.
The Guardian
20-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Performing is not some gigantic thing – it's just me breathing': Obongjayar on the journey from shyness to stardom
Right before he began work on his second album, someone told Obongjayar it was time to 'start writing songs'. 'I remember being really pissed,' laughs the artist, whose real name is Steven Umoh – though, in person, he goes by 'OB'. 'Like, what the fuck? What do you think I've been doing this whole time?' The incredulity seems fair. The 32-year-old Nigerian singer has been releasing work for more than a decade, running the gamut of genres from hip-hop to Afrobeat to experimental electronics to spoken word, alt-rock and soul. It has made him something of a critics' darling, but if you're not familiar with his solo music (his debut album, 2022's Some Nights I Dream of Doors, was stunning), odds are you've heard his lithe, gravelly inflections on Richard Russell's Everything Is Recorded project, or warming up UK rap star Little Simz tracks such as 2021's glorious Point and Kill, or sampled by super-producer du jour Fred Again on the 2023 behemoth Adore U. The last of these, which interpolated vocals from Obongjayar's I Wish It Was Me, was eye-opening for Umoh. Appearing on stage with Fred Again to perform the track, he saw how tens of thousands of people were responding to it in real time. It was 'crazy', he says, and invaluable. 'Fred knows the crux of the song, the thing that's going to hold you and shake you, and distils it down to that. And when you see how people relate to something, how it touches people, that's when I started to get it.' The experience drove Umoh to reconsider what it meant to 'write songs' – not as a newly commercial endeavour, but recognising that art should reach people. He comes up with an analogy about aliens needing to translate their language in order to be understood and have actual impact. Umoh is like this: pouring out long, thoughtful metaphors on the spot, gesticulating wildly, full of such sincere warmth and enthusiasm for, as he puts it, 'yapping', that he leaves the full English he ordered untouched for the entirety of our conversation – and then the ensuing photoshoot. At one point he's waggling his hand in my face in the shape of a gun to reiterate how strongly he stands for his beliefs: 'If you said you'd shoot me dead unless I said what you wanted me to say, I'd say, 'Cool, kill me bro!'' He has not always been this exuberant. Back in Calabar, a port city in south-eastern Nigeria where he spent most of his childhood, Umoh was extremely shy. Aged six, his family laughed at his dream of performing songs to a huge crowd. It was Umoh's grandmother, of whom he speaks fondly, who coaxed him out of his shyness. She was his main caregiver after his mum, a survivor of domestic violence, relocated to the UK while pregnant with his younger sister. Umoh recalls her encouraging him to be less afraid. 'She said, 'There's no point. What's the worst that can happen?'' he recalls. The notion stuck with him, and he now thinks of shyness as its own form of self-centredness: 'The only person who really cares is you.' Today, Umoh cuts a striking figure. He is tall, beaming, dressed in an 'I heart London' T-shirt, lurid green sunglasses and bulky silver jewellery. 'I've been awake since 3am,' is the first thing he announces as he takes a seat outside the Deptford cafe he has chosen for our interview, not too far from where he lives in south London. The sun is shining, and he suspects it's his hay fever that's been keeping him up. He is also on the precipice of releasing album number two, Paradise Now. It's a glorious record of big songs, from gleaming pop numbers to strutting basslines to tender quasi-bossa-nova undercut by occasional west African grooves. This is all topped with a playful, Kate Bush-esque knack for the voice as its own instrument: yelping falsettos, silky crooning, seething growls, all woven together with his trademark honeyed sweetness. The album finds Obongjayar dwelling on family, the passage of time, relationships, faith, self, his anger at the British government. None of this is a cynical rehash of Adore U; instead, it seems the lesson Umoh has learned is to whittle further into himself, toying with the bones of classic song structures, repeating the mantra: 'Of me, from me, for the world.' Surely knowing that people are about to hear the album has got to be at least somewhat stressful? 'I know that I love the record,' he shrugs. 'So my thinking is: it's gonna come out and whatever's gonna happen, it's gonna happen. It's like a fingerprint, it's your voice – there's nothing you can do about how people receive that. If it sells a million first week? Incredible. If it sells two pounds first week, it's incredible too. I'm just in this place of contentment.' He likens the feeling to getting on stage. In live performances, Umoh exudes vibrancy, the music moving through him, a picture of confidence. 'I know what I am, I know what I can do,' he says, 'I wrote the songs, I love the songs – it came from me. So performing the songs is not this gigantic thing … it's just me breathing.' Clearly, his grandma's words have had an effect. By the time he was 17 and had moved to Ashford, Surrey to live with his mum, Umoh was uploading raps online, putting on an American accent. He went to university in Norwich, where he began to sing in his own voice, and it was not long after that his SoundCloud began to gain traction. Still, early 2000s hip-hop was his first love, and he points to the genre as an example of what all great art should aspire to do: 'When people say that a lot of white people love hip-hop or whatever? [That means] it can translate to people who have nothing to do with that culture nor have any experience or understanding of it. That's music that has had an effect on the world.' Umoh does not shy away from politics in his music. His first album featured Message in a Hammer, a track about the 2020 Lekki toll gate massacre in Lagos; on Paradise Now, there's Jellyfish, a scathing song about spineless British politicians. For Obongjayar, like his heroes Fela Kuti and Bob Marley, music having a message does not mean it has to be at the expense of a good tune. 'I think there was a point where I was like …' he puts on an affected, earnest voice, ''I gotta be conscious, bro, I gotta write stuff that's gonna change the world!'' He laughs. 'Nah man, I don't think music operates like that, or that it has the licence to do that. Saying what you feel shouldn't come at the cost of the music. If you're trying to hammer in a message, you're putting yourself in front of the thing and it becomes indulgent. If you shout at people, no one gives a shit.' Jellyfish is an engrossing, high-energy rager with distorted staccatos of electronics and percussion. Only by listening closely will you hear lines like: 'My heart is watermelon' and 'Bomb bomb spawned by the stars and stripes'. For Umoh, this isn't telling people what to think, but rather expressing his own anger. 'Seeing how governments move, people in power, corporations – how for whatever monetary reasons you sell yourself,' he says, hitting the table for emphasis. 'I was really pissed off with how spineless Britain was in response to Israel-Palestine. Waiting for America? Why are you being such a bitch, bro? You're in a position where you can turn the tables, where you can say, 'That's fucked up, that's wrong, we don't stand for that.' The Conservatives, Keir, it's the same shit – they're so spineless and it pisses me off.' On social media, Umoh is 'Obongjayar, Devil Slayer', but he says this is more about reckoning with his own demons. Umoh was raised as a Christian, and though he wouldn't describe himself as such these days, his work and person is still imbued with spirituality. Album two finds cries of 'hallelujah!' and reflections on prayer – and, obviously, it's called Paradise Now. He explains: 'This isn't about paradise as a destination. I think paradise is now, it's here, this is part of it. Every moment is an opportunity to soak in beauty. It's not taking 'now' for granted, it's your relationship with yourself and the world around you.' For Obongjayar, success will be in his ability to communicate that sentiment through writing songs. As he says: 'The most important part is being able to take my perspective on how I see the world and where I'm from, what my mind sees, and translate that vision into a language where everyone else can understand what it is. That's peak artistry.' Paradise Now is released on 30 May via September Recordings. Obongjayar tours in November
New York Times
25-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Want to Talk About Loss? For This Label Head's Album, Many Stars Did.
At the height of the pandemic in 2020 and 2021, the English music producer Richard Russell realized how many conversations he was having about mortality and loss. Russell owns the label XL Recordings, whose roster has included Radiohead and Adele. He also makes his own studio albums, with widely assorted collaborators, under the rubric Everything Is Recorded. With permission, he started recording the death-haunted discussions. Those voices would find their way into the opening track and shape the overarching theme of the third Everything Is Recorded album, 'Temporary,' due Friday. The songs materialize in a soundscape that mingles past and present, new performances and vintage samples. The lyrics reflect on grief, separation, regrets and memories, but also on survivorship — on what comes afterward. 'I didn't want to make a miserable record,' Russell, 53, said via video from the Copper House, his studio in London, where many of the conversations and most of the album were recorded. 'It's not meant to be that. It's meant to be joyous, and it was quite joyous to make it. 'In a way it's about loss,' he continued. 'But it's about how to be all right with loss, how to accept it, how to embrace it, to not resist it. Obviously, music can be a huge part of that. Music is one of the things that can provide genuine solace.' Wearing an olive-drab T-shirt, Russell gave a virtual tour of the main studio, a brick-walled space with synthesizers, mixers, an upright piano and an old-fashioned recording console. A wooden wall sculpture from India hung overhead, adding color as well as sound diffusion for live recording. It's a carving of birds; the album begins and ends with bird songs. 'There's a nice Gil Scott-Heron lyric in the song 'I Think I'll Call It Morning,'' he noted, referring to an older track, 'where he says, 'Birds got something to teach us all about being free.'' Russell has had the career trajectory of a committed, crate-digging music fan. 'I mostly see myself as a non-musician,' he said. 'I try to make that a strength. I'm not a virtuoso player of any instrument, but I like to be involved and to facilitate people to do stuff. And I'm not afraid of getting things wrong.' In the 1980s and early 1990s, he worked at record stores in England and the United States, including a stint at the New York City dance-music epicenter Vinylmania. He was a D.J. and party promoter in England during the rave movement's idealistic heyday. He learned to use sampling to produce tracks, and in 1992 he had a Top 10 single in England, 'The Bouncer,' with Kicks Like a Mule, his duo with a founder of the XL label, Nick Halkes. Russell moved to the business side of music as an A&R scout, and in 1994 he became the head of XL Recordings. With a roster that, through the decades, included the Prodigy, the White Stripes, Vampire Weekend and FKA twigs, XL has lived up to Russell's stated ambition: to merge — as he wrote in 'Liberation Through Hearing,' his 2020 memoir — 'artistic otherness and commercial savvy.' While the label thrived, Russell decided not to expand too far. He decreed that XL would only release five albums a year. 'It's anti-business. It's anti-growth,' he said. 'It was the realization for me that this thing will lose what it has if it starts doing too much stuff.' In the 2010s, Russell moved back into production. He signed longtime American musicians that he admired — Scott-Heron and Bobby Womack — to make what would be their last studio albums. Construction had already begun on the Copper House when, in 2013, Russell was immobilized with a severe case of an autoimmune disease, Guillain-Barré syndrome, that left him paralyzed and then bedridden for months of recovery. 'That experience of not being able to do stuff, of being incapacitated, and then being able to do everything again was an incredible gift,' he said. 'It really gave me pleasure in small things, like being able to walk up to Portobello Road and get a coffee with my dog.' While day-to-day operations at XL continued in trusted hands, Russell produced albums by Ibeyi, a duo of twin sisters born in France to a Cuban father and a French-Venezuelan mother, and began assembling material for Everything Is Recorded, which released its first album in 2018. He also gathered musicians at the Copper House for extended, free-form, seasonal jams to mark solstices and equinoxes, which he then edited and reshaped into song-length tracks that he released free on Bandcamp. 'With record-making, there's the childlike stage — the mess-making — and then there's the grown-up stage, the tidying up,' he said. 'I enjoy both of those parts. In the first stage, there's no boundaries. But in the second stage I'm trying to be absolutely creatively acute. There's a sort of ruthlessness to that. Like, what's really necessary here?' Jah Wobble, who played bass in Public Image Ltd. and many subsequent projects, anchored the 'Autumn Equinox' jams and appears on 'Temporary.' For him, Russell's Copper House sessions were a happy throwback. 'You're sitting in a room, you're chatting, the other musicians are very nice,' he said. 'There's a nice balance between men and women, so it's not a macho kind of vibe. You play for a long time, but it's just fun, it's kind of meditational. There's not really any sort of crude, crass direction. 'It allows everything to happen in its own time,' he continued. 'No one records like that anymore that I know of. It's kind of a psychedelic, '60s kind of mentality. There's a desire to get away from hierarchies and boundaries, so there's a state of flow, a state of flux.' The first two Everything Is Recorded albums were grounded in riffs and electronic rhythms that echoed Russell's formative years, when punk, hip-hop, reggae and dance music converged. Back then, he said, 'There was no interest in the past. It was all just, like, forward! I think that was very optimistic. It was like, 'Technology, great! What could go wrong?'' But on 'Temporary,' Russell vastly expands his time frame, drawing on samples from a more distant past: folk-rooted sounds from Jackson C. Frank and Molly Drake, 1960s soul from Camille Yarbrough and gospel from Edna Gallmon Cooke. The album features some of Russell's previous Everything Is Recorded collaborators, among them the rapper Berwyn, the saxophonist Kamasi Washington and the doleful, liquid-voiced singer and songwriter Sampha, who has worked on all three albums. 'A lot of the process is us jamming and Richard editing and notating things,' Sampha said in a phone interview. 'Sometimes he'll show me music and I'll just freestyle over something very quickly. And then I'll come back, like, a couple of months later and he'll show me something: 'Remember this?'' Samantha Morton, the Oscar-nominated English actress, writer and director, made a soul-baring 2024 album with Russell, 'Daffodils & Dirt,' and also appears on 'Temporary.' In a phone interview, Morton said that working with Russell was 'like when you're dancing with somebody and you both know the steps. And it's really weird because you haven't rehearsed any of the dance moves, but you're able to not tread on each other's toes. We seem to speak the same language without identifying what language we're speaking.' Other contributors on 'Temporary' include Florence Welch of Florence + the Machine, the saxophonist and songwriter Alabaster DePlume, the trad-rock singer Maddy Prior (delivering 'Ether,' a song with lyrics by Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend) and the sepulchral-voiced indie-rock songwriter Bill Callahan in a remote duet — using Callahan's iPhone voice-memo vocals and guitar — with Noah Cyrus. In a video interview, Callahan recalled that Russell asked, ''Is there anyone that you would like to write a song for?' I said, 'Noah Cyrus.' And he was, like, 'I'll see what I can do.'' Russell also asked Callahan for a second track, requesting 'an a cappella song about loss.' Callahan supplied 'Norm,' a tribute to the comedian Norm MacDonald, who died in 2021. A friend who heard it suggested, ''Well, you should do a whole record like this,'' Callahan said. 'And then I said that to Richard. And he was like, 'Let's do it.' Now it's up to me to send a cappella songs.' In 'Norm,' Callahan sings, 'Voice and face live on / Norm's gone'; Russell added excerpts from MacDonald's performances. Much of 'Temporary' comes across as a dialogue between the living and the dead. In packaging the album, Russell had portraits made of both the sampled performers and the ones he recorded, displaying them side by side. On 'Temporary,' recording is a step toward immortality. 'This must have always been, from when people started making marks on cave walls,' Russell said. 'It must be in our DNA. People are just relentless in wanting to make things, and it has now become very apparent that the stuff lasts longer than the people. Maybe that's why it's such an important part of human existence to make art.'
