Talent Crush: Wayne Snow
Wayne Snow is a Nigeria-born Berlin-based neo soul artist with rich and enticing vocals carefully wrapped in explicit yet philosophical lyrics. The Time is Now (or Now is the Time), the meaning of Wayne’s given name Kesiena, couldn’t possibly fit his fearless approach to creativity any better, and Now is exactly the Time for any artist out there to create their own world, to give it any meaning or form, regardless of the stereotypical pressure of modern-day industries, content-making machines, and all the boxes and sticky labels they have recklessly created, but a Rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet. The list of Wayne’s collaborators includes FKJ, Darius, Max Graef, and Tom Misch, among others. We talked about his relationship with long-time collaborator Terence N’guyen (aka Darius), the existential journey that led him all the way to Berlin, and the cost of finding your voice in the world full of doubt and chaos.
KELLY KORZUN: How’s your body feeling today?
WAYNE SNOW: I’m feeling alright. I’m a bit sick due to the windy season. One season is dying while another one is emerging, so the body is confused, and getting sick is the way our bodies adapt to these changes to get a bit more strength. Very shitty weather here in Berlin, cold and rainy. We’re entering the worst part of the year.
KK: To be honest, and it’s likely a very unpopular opinion, but I’m not a huge fan of summer. Don’t get me wrong, I totally get why people love it, but there’s something so beautiful about nature dying and the new cycle of life resetting our inner clocks. So, to me, it feels more like the beginning, rather than the end. There’s no rebirth without death, and death doesn’t have to be associated with fear, pain, and horror – it’s a necessary and beautiful part of life that I wish our society embraced more. On the other hand, I’m a winter baby, so I’m biased because cold weather evokes many childhood memories.
WS: Yes, I get it, but it also depends on the place you’re in. Germans can be very distant and cold, but in the summer they are more relaxed and social, very lovely. As soon as the summer is gone, there’s this wall again – the mood changes drastically.
KK: There’s a reason why I kicked off our conversation with this particular question. Just by observing the way you perform (and it’s something I first noticed in your Figurine performance on Colors), one can tell that your body plays a massive role in your creative process. As you know, I’m a huge fan of dancing, so any music I listen to gets evaluated by my body first. The way you were moving and vibing in that video was a true testament to you feeling the music as an entity on a physical body level. What does the body and mind connection represent in your process?
WS: I’ve always felt that music is attached to the body. I’ve always enjoyed dancing, but I also enjoyed watching people dance, and I would remember some music not through the sound, but rather through the way people were grooving to it and moving their bodies to it. When it comes to making music, the first thing you address is the body because you want your music to speak to the body before it speaks to the mind. When I started composing music, I’d try to put myself in movement while also imagining in a given space how people would dance to it. When I’m singing, I’m also moving because every part of my body becomes music, the entity that’s expressing itself through my body. In some religions, people are moving to the music while being in a very ecstatic state, as if they’re possessed or something, which I think is the true nature of music. In this body and mind connection, the mind remains silent, and there’s just the body experiencing something.
KK: It’s a form of meditation.
WS: Yes. The mind doesn’t do anything, it’s inactive. The moment you start thinking is when the music stops as it’s no longer connected to the body.
KK: That’s one of the reasons I like bikram and the way it puts me in a high-quality meditation with my mind being completely silent for up t0 90 min, and I think I’ve always liked dancing for that same reason. When you’re dancing, you’re just letting go and allowing yourself to just be, which we don’t do enough of as we get older. There’s this quote by Wynton Marsalis, legendary jazz trumpeter, who once got asked if jazz music is for the player or for the listener, to which he replied: jazz is always for the listener, but the first listener is the player. Treating your body as a music instrument is what I find extremely interesting about you, but we also know that movement and chanting were there way before the development of language. When I listen to musicians like Richard Bona, I don’t really need to understand the words because of music’s ability to transcend emotions. Have you ever considered recording music in your native language? What was the first dialect you picked up as a kid?
WS: Oh, I’ve learned many. The modality in my hometown is Urhobo, but there are many other dialects around the city, so I picked up many of them, as well as some broken English. When I started writing poems and other things of the mind, I dug a bit deeper into English and found ways to add some elements of my own origin and a few other things I discovered along the way, so I ended up making it my own thing.
KK: Sonically, are the differences in these dialects subtle or more drastic?
WS: When I lived in France and studied French history, there was a similar thing with French religion: different tribes would have very different languages, which is quite interesting. There might be a tribe in France, a tribe in Hungary, and a tribe in Finland, and all of them would sound alike because of sharing the same roots. Same thing in Nigeria. I’ve always been fascinated by the historic aspect of movement. How come my tribe sounds like this, but at the same time we sound like some tribes in Togo? How did we move historically that made us sound like this? Which aspects of it were informed vs our own choice? The older I get, the more I appreciate these things about any tribes anywhere in the world and the musicality of that movement, but I don’t think I’m ready to make music in my native language just yet. I’ve always had a strong belief that whatever you’re putting out there, whatever is being released, is always impacted by your surroundings. I lived in many places abroad, in France, in Germany, and traveled a lot in the western world, but I still haven’t found any logical reason to record in my native language, but if, say, I had to move there and it would become my reality, I would surely put something out.
KK: So you want it to feel organic, you don’t want it to feel forced.
WS: That’s it. When I lived in France, the closest sound to that environment for me was English. Musicality is what I got from back home because music is central to our general expression. Only when I moved to Europe many years later, I saw music being put in the box to make it sound a certain way to make money, but back home I never saw it that way because playing music and dancing to it was very natural in our culture.
KK: Growing up, reading was one of the main sources of self-entertainment. Being the only kid, and quite reserved, I’ve always had this urge to communicate things to the world, and writing was one of the things that would allow me to express myself in a very effective and poignant way. With poetry specifically, you can communicate so much with just a few words – it’s so expressive. Looking at Figurine and its lyrical content, it looks like there’s a recurring theme of a play, almost in a theatrical way, with characters playing roles and wearing masks. In what way do you think this concept of play manifests itself in your artistic expression? What does it represent?
WS: Generally, I tend to put or observe things in a very absurd way. When I’m writing, sometimes I want to express something serious, but at the same time I’m asking myself what is the point of being serious when everything is absurd, you know? Regardless of what I say lyrically, it will be received completely differently depending on the mood of the listener. The act of playing is everywhere. For example, when we are in love, we’re playing with someone’s heart. We say we love them, but there’s also this aspect of possession to it. Everything has a double meaning, and this duality can be expressed metaphorically.
KK: Let’s talk about Berlin and its role in your artistic path because your music has this very refreshing and unique blend of traditional African inflictions and contemporary electronic production. Raven by Kelela, one of the best releases of the last year, was entirely recorded in Berlin in tandem with LSDXOXO (Philly-born Berlin-based producer), and released by Warp Records, the home of Alex Twin, Autechre, and Boards of Canada. Raven feels very monochromatic just like the city it was born in, and there’s a lot of sorrow and solemnity woven into it. What is it about Berlin that enhances the production aspect of the material?
WS: Berlin carries a lot of things, and one of them is the sound of concrete. Depending on where you live, your surroundings become your instruments. If you’re in Berlin, production-wise, there’s gonna be a lot of concrete-like sounds: bricks, blocks, stuff like that. I’ve never been to Detroit, but I’ve listened to a lot of its music, and there’s a similarity in the industrial quality of production. Another magical thing about Berlin is a freedom of thoughts, a freedom to express myself freely as a person of my complexion. Being black and being Nigerian, the thing I have struggled with in Paris was being told that I have to sound like that, and as I said earlier, I’d always try to sound like my surroundings, but coming to Berlin made me go even deeper in order to find out what makes me a man, and when I say man, I mean a human being, but then I’m also defined as a man. All these existential questions turned into sounds and constant exploration of ideas to shape the music, so I very much understand someone like Kelela who is also given a certain physical body. Her colors are from the school of melodies and harmonies because her background is jazz music, but her inspiration was to look for a different formula because she sees the world the way it is, and she found a good friend and companion on that journey to craft her work.
KK: She wanted to make something that would feel authentic to her as a human being, regardless of her physical appearance or representation, and this is what contributed to this record striking a cord in such a compelling way. It’s also interesting that you brought up Detroit’s industrial soundscape: one of the reasons why The White Stripes music so textural is because Jack White really wanted to dig deep into the Detroit sound, and these sounds are so visceral – you can almost hear the machinery at work. It also serves as a perfect background for the Third Man Records manufacturing facility. Each city has its own personality, and you end up learning from each city and growing with it. How did each of the cities you lived in change you and the way you approach creativity?
WS: Just like you, I was a quite reserved kid, but I also liked being challenged, so whenever there was any sport or competition, I wanted to be best at it, and I was into breakdancing in my early years back in Nigeria. When I moved to France, I couldn’t speak French, so I remained silent and wouldn’t say anything for almost two years. Instead, I would read in the library, I would daydream, and sometimes I would fall in love with the girl without her ever knowing how I felt because it was all in my head. Slowly, I started experimenting with my voice and trying to emulate artists like Boyz II Men to see if I could reach those notes, but I would also write poetry in French and English whenever I would feel something or experience high level of beauty to recollect that memory through writing. At that time, I was also reading a lot of jazz books, listening to jazz artists, and picturing myself being lost while trying to connect to this magical world of sound. From there, I started playing with friends, joined bands, made some shitty music, and tried to compose things to fit in the world, but I also knew that I had to find a job, and by trying to do things that people expected from me, I realized that I was absolutely not good at that. I’d get fired from many jobs because I was always in my own world and very slow, and the reason for that was that I’d be stuck with the sounds and words in my head, stuck with admiring beauty, the beauty of people singing, the beauty of their voice. It took me a while to find people who had similar experience and saw the world the way I did. On a musical side, I tried to produce some work, but, in many ways, I failed to do exactly what I heard in my head, and what made me land in Berlin was letting go of this artificial side of myself and destroying that clone of myself that I created to fit in and please people. When I moved to Berlin, I felt like I had to find the person I was meant to be, so I went on this existential quest just like in Camus’ or Sartre’s fiction, and that was the energy I had back then and the energy I have right now. I’m really curious about what I’m gonna discover next because I don’t give a fuck about what people think or expect of me anymore.
KK: I’m in a very similar territory right now, in my fuck it era. I’m just catering to my inner child without asking permission or seeking external validation, which is very liberating, but arriving to this state has been quite a journey, as you already know from my personal story.
WS: It’s never easy when you decide to do that. We all have this tendency to label people and put them into a box, so even if we’re granting ourselves this freedom, we’re not always giving the same freedom to others. It’a a very difficult exercise to apply upon oneself and upon others, yet I would still encourage everyone to let other people be while they’re figuring out who they are. Just let them be – the world needs it a lot. We can never be what we were meant to be, at any given age, because our consciousness is an ever-growing and evolving entity.
KK: Remember, the first listener is the player, so it always starts with yourself, and in order to allow others to be, you need to allow it to yourself first. Allowing yourself to feel everything you’re feeling is liberating, for it creates so much room for love – you’re less judgemental of yourself, and, as a result, less judgemental of others.
WS: Exactly, but you have to go through a lot in order to get to this point. It’s a very difficult journey, as you know. Certain environments can help you reach that state very quickly because you feel validated, you feel that you’re in a safe space to experiment, to fail and then try again, in order to find something to stick with and move forward. There’s a lot we can do ourselves, but if there’s no environment to support us, it’s very tough.
KK: And I think we’re very similar in this regard. We can be very reserved, but we also have this pure side that’s very playful and not serious at all, and these two sides balance each other out.
WS: It all circles back to my double thinking, the duality aspect of the game we call life.
KK: Now, to make things a little less serious, I’m gonna tell you a funny story about how I met Darius, your long-time collaborator. As you know, I’m in Paris a lot because of the art show I’m currently working on, which started with my artist residency in Paris a few years ago, and because of Marc Chagall and other sentimental connections I have to the city. One night, my friend introduced me to Antoine, founder of Divine agency, and we all went dancing together. At one point, we ended up chatting about the agency, and Antoine brought up Darius as one of the music acts I might be familiar with. I said that I’m not entirely sure, and that I’ll definitely check him out. Then, Antoine said that his friend will join us for drinks later, and I ended up sitting right next to this friend, who was introduced to me as Terence. When I asked him what he does, he said he is a musician, so, naturally, we started talking about music. At one one point, I mentioned METAL & DVST and asked him if he could share any of his stuff because I might potentially feature him. Being an independent entity, I don’t really care if the artist is big or not because the only thing that matters is if they’re passionate about what they do, and I definitely saw that in Terence. We called it a night, he asked for my IG, and, while listening to music on my way home, I looked up Darius and realized that tracks like Helios and Equilibrium were already in heavy rotation, with Hot Hands being recently played pretty much on repeat. Came home, checked my IG before going to bed, and saw a notification: @darius.music started following you. This is when it finally clicked, but, you know, the vibe that he was giving was very chill, not pretentious at all, but he was a bit shy about his English, so maybe it also played a part. How did the two of you meet and what have you learned from each other throughout your collaborative process?
WS: I was approached by his team because of track called Running that I released with Max Graef, which was the first well-known track I did after moving to Berlin. One of my friends introduced Max to me as an A-level producer who really stands out and helped to arrange a meeting with him. When I went to his place, he played a few things for me, including the instrumental of Running, and I remember that at this moment I received a somewhat annoying message from my mom, so the energy I got from it was something like not again, like I needed to run away from it, and that’s what made this track sound futuristic, but in a childish sense. When I was a kid and saw a television for the first time, it was some tv show with robots and machine sounds, which for me was something out of this planet and far away. Running ended up having this very brassy machine-like sound that I complimented with the most fragile voice I could make so that it would stick with it and color it with human emotion. From what I know, Crayon was hanging out with Darius and told him about me. He sent me a track to try out things with me, but I said that I generally prefer collaborating in person. His team wasn’t sure, so I decided to do something very quick with the vocals on one of his tracks, which was Helios, sent it over, and they really liked it. Now that the saw what I was capable of, they flew me over to Paris. When we met in the studio, I realized that Darius really loves black music, sitting on the grove, so he naturally had this black approach to sound. Also, in contrast to the underground and dirty sound I had in Berlin, he loved carving and shaping very clean arrangements and sounds. What I ended up bringing to the table was a bit of my eccentric vision and poetic approach, something a bit more offbeat and jazzy. When I sing, I don’t sing with many words, I tend to not say too much, but rather put some stuff here and there, and when I dropped my vocals on Helios, I suggested we make a track from scratch. He played me a very unfinished track, just the first loop, and that track was Nightbirds, and I would give him ideas and melodies so that we could improvise to build a track together. And, on the lyrical side, since I’m a fan of poetry and making metaphors, I always had to explain to him what I meant. He’s very French, and his English wasn’t that good, so it would take me some time to make him understand the meanings behind my words, but the thing that I liked about Darius was that he was very naive, very open, but his ego and ambition were strong. He really trusted me with my words and vocals because when you’re good at what you do, one can trust you, and, as collaborators, we had that trust in one another.
KK: I know that at one point he started digging into practicing jazz piano chords more, perhaps you brought that influence.
WS: I think he just wanted to grow as a musician as he reached a point where he couldn’t move any further, and he wanted to grasp that technical language of jazz. When you listen to my music, you can clearly hear the jazz aspect of it. Darius tends to make very pop and easy-listening music, but when we work together, I always make sure there’s a bit more complexity to it, and, as an artist, I don’t mind being complex sometimes. When making Equilibrium, even the word itself seemed weird to him. He was like: Bro, can we change this word? How can French people pronounce it? Ee-kwi-lib-ree-uhm. That really made me laugh a lot, but I explained to him that it’s an important word and why it makes sense to keep it.
KK: When talking about the album you’re currently working on, you mentioned that it’s about unlearning patterns and regaining the balance. What were the things you had to unlearn?
WS: With Figurine, I tried to have a discussion around this concept of not having to wear a mask and hiding your true self, and then it grew into doing more research and reading specific books that would help me find ways to talk about my traumatic experience while also being guided by something that comes from some hidden experiences of life, and it all started with My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Manakem. In this book, he talks about the black body and the black experience versus blue body, which is the police in America, and how we all suffer from the trauma of white supremacy and racism, so it’s not just about the head, it’s also about the body and many ways in which it carries this collective trauma. As I was reading it, it resonated with me and linked to this idea of music being a body language that we discussed earlier, which made me ask myself some questions. Am I in full control of the music I’m making or is it controlling me? Am I just revealing the things that are already there and my job is to shine a light on them, or they just speak to me at a given point when my consciousness allows it? All these questions and research shaped the album. When I was in the studio, I allowed myself to feel things coming out of my body, to feel the struggle, to be vulnerable, and to sing the way I never allowed myself to sing before. I’d invite people and friends in the room and ask them to give me words I’m not used to using to deliberately put myself in a vulnerable state, to challenge myself and embrace this traumatic side of mine, so this album is a sonic experiment and a trojan horse because you’ll find me taking something you think you know and putting a twist on it, which I took a lot of pleasure in doing.
KK: Speaking of control, it feels like this idea of control is quite prominent in your creative process where you’re working within a predefined framework, and I know that you always come into the studio very prepared, with a fully-fledged concept in mind, ready to fight. Where do you think this need for control comes from? Does having a solid base make you feel more comfortable when it comes to improvisation?
WS: This part of me, that clone that I ended up hating, was a part of my ego built upon my survival instinct of the past, but this ego occupied space where it would decide for myself and give everyone impression that I knew things that I actually didn’t know. When in the studio, people would assume that I knew exactly what I was doing, and I ended up believing it too, but when I finally let go of that ego and destroyed it, I’d practice a lot, sing, and try to think about what I was gonna say in my music, and if you wanna talk about a given topic, you need to learn about it. Michael Checkov’s psycho-physical technique is a great example of body and mind working together. Coming into the studio with a trained body and mind allows me to dive into the chaos yet pivot anytime, if needed, without feeling lost. When it comes to collaboration, there’s confidence of knowing your tools, but no one can predict the outcome. Accepting the fact that you don’t know the outcome, that you have no control over it, just this thing alone will make you go further, but you need a solid base to stand on. When entering the room, it’s about being confident in who you are and what you can bring, but at the same time allowing the room to give you something.
KK: The beginner’s mind of Socrates. Again, there’s this duality where the fighter in you comes into the studio fully prepared so that the kid in you can feel safe and just enjoy the process. Years ago, I interviewed Christina de Middel, a Spanish documentary photographer and author of the critically acclaimed book Afronauts, which was photographed in Nigeria.
WS: Yes, I have it here, in my home.
KK: No way. Are you serious?
WS: Yes, I think my wife gave it to me.
KK: In our interview, she said that her experience in Nigeria was very frustrating at first because she felt like she wasn’t welcomed there, and that it’s been a very challenging process to work on this series because everyone treated her as an outsider. Reading My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Amos Tutuola made things easier, and so did time. Africa is a world of contrasts where light and darkness coexist, but there’s poetry in friction. What’s the most beautiful thing about Nigeria?
WS: Nigeria is an idea, a union of different nations, tribes and kingdoms, and what’s beautiful about this country is that we’re longing to have a common history, and this longing translates in many ways and in all forms of art. This beauty and passion is what helps us shape our form as a nation, which I find very beautiful. For many years, we’ve been pushed here and there; there’s so many of us and we’re so different, but right now we have heroes representing this divided nation that we are.
KK: What’s the least beautiful thing about Nigeria?
WS: The least beautiful thing is this attachment to material things. Money is the word you’ll hear a lot in Nigeria. All this capitalism, this tendency to own things, is the ugliest thing you’ll see in Nigeria – it’s so bad for the soul.
KK: In one of your tracks, Seventy, the lyrics say: as you’re walking by the river with no answers to your questions, but if you open up your heart, you’ll see, if you open up your heart, you’ll be free. There’s so much pain and raw emotion coming from you when you’re singing that verse live. What allowed you to finally open your heart to the world?
WS: It’s about loving and wanting to love unconditionally, but the person who truly loves suffers a lot, and the more you love, the more you suffer because you are bound to see the truth. That’s what I felt, and I’m still feeling it, I’m still trying to love more and more, beyond everything. The world will make you doubt this love, but the more you open your heart, the more you understand that we are beings of love, and the consciousness we’re blessed with allows us to grasp that truth and understand everything. Even the worst criminal can be understood and loved.
KK: And forgiven.
WS: And forgiven. Music is the process, and if I didn’t keep loving it, I’d stop doing it, but because I’m so in love with everything, every damn thing, I just can’t stop making music. I’ll never stop.
KK: What’s freedom to you?
WS: Being able to speak out things in the environment that allows for it. There are places in the world, including many religious places, where people are terrified of being free, so they created all kinds of things to hold them from being free, and then you have places where the mind is quite free to run around, where this freedom is pushed to its very limit, it can go far, and that freedom is perhaps something that allows our consciousness grow, but one should be very careful of how far this freedom should go. Hope it answers anything.
KK: It does. It answers everything.
