#luakaboprecords

"Who Is William Onyeabor?"

First of all, I have to admit that I love stories of great musicians with an unknown background, like f.e. Rodriguez. One of these stories is the story of William Onyeabor.

Born in 1945 (or 1946, no one knows…) there´re a lot of rumors about his life. Some say, that he studied Cinematography in Russia and tried to become a film-maker in his home country afterwards. After this plan plan didn´t work out, he fell into music making and producing with synthesizers. So one of the still unanswered question is, where and how he got these pretty expensive MOOG´s in Nigera during the 70s.

Nevertheless he released some great records in between 1977 (“Crashes in Love”) and 1985 (“Anything You Sow”). Surprisingly his records sold well and got great feedback within Nigeria and Africa. His patterns are static, but moving. His instrumentation is modern. You don´t have to be a genius to recognize the parallels to Kraftwerk… In a way.

Every DJ played Onyeabor and every store sold his records. But the person “William Onyeabor” was – and still is – a mystery. He avoided publicity as much as he could. He didn´t meet journalists or guests, he refused to talk about himself and his music and until today there´re only few photos of him.

An indispensable result of this behaviour was the shrinking awareness level of William Onyeabor. It took years, after some NY guys of the record label Luaka Bop Records discovered Onyeabor for themselves and somehow managed to release a compilation of some of his greatest tracks with the perfectly fitting title “Who Is William Onyeabor?” in 2013. This record caused a massive hype of this “crazy and weird and mysterious African guy”. The blog NOWNESS shot a great video for “Fantastic Man”, Noise shot a short documentary (featuring Damon Albarn, Caribou, Femi Kuti etc. …) etc. …

This year Luaka Bop Records responded to this massive success with a cover record called “What?!” featuring artists like Hot Chip, The Vaccines, Joakim, Daphni and many more. Let´s see what´s next!