Oy & The Art of Translating Between The Stage and The Studio

Africa is a Country has been a fan of Ghanaian-Swiss audio experimentalist Oy’s live performances for a while. Tom’s posting of Hallelujah was my own introduction to her strange but mesmerizing audio-visual creations:

A host of other and new exciting tunes will soon be released in recorded form and available to the world. From a music producer’s perspective, I get really excited to hear how such captivating performances are manifested on record. The process of translating a song from the studio to the stage and vice versa is an art in itself, one that not all musicians can do well.

Oy’s sophomore album, Kokokyinaka, is a highly enjoyable journey that inventively incorporates field recordings into digital production techniques. The label’s press release gives insight into the album’s creative process:

The wildly vibrant sample base includes a parachute, fufu pounding, fireworks, and a shoe. Along with all of the animated stories it was mostly collected on trips to Mali, Burkina Faso, Ghana, and during a residency in South Africa. The actual writing and the production for the record took place at studios located in Berlin under the guidance of talented drummer, producer, and co-writer Lleluja-Ha.

Throughout the course of the album we accompany her through her explorations of African cultural intricacies from the perspective of a half-in half-out Afro-European. This makes it easy for comparisons to mixed Afro-European vocalists like Nneka or Anbuley to pop in my head. But, Joy’s album stands apart because instead of straight ahead pop, dance, Hip-Hop or soul album, this project feels like a personal journey that is just as experimental culturally as it is technically.

For more on Joy, check out an interview with her on OkayAfrica, and this teaser for her latest video:

http://vimeo.com/62645660

 

Further Reading

Djinns in Berlin

At the 13th Berlin Biennale, works from Zambia and beyond summon unseen forces to ask whether solidarity can withstand the gaze of surveillance.

Colonize then, deport now

Trump’s deportation regime revives a colonial blueprint first drafted by the American Colonization Society, when Black lives were exiled to Africa to safeguard a white republic.

On Safari

On our annual publishing break, Gaza’s genocide continues to unfold in real time yet slips from public grasp. This is not just a crisis of politics, but of how reality is mediated—and why we must build spaces where meaning can still take root.

The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.

The grift tank

In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.