Ibibio Sound Machine on their album Electricity and breaking down musical boundaries

To say that Eno Williams has a positive demeanour is an understatement.

She must be one of the most cheerful, optimistic people I’ve ever come across, and from the sounds of it, I’m not the only one to have noticed.

“Yeah, sometimes people say ‘Why are you always so positive, or so hopeful?’,’’ she laughs.

There’s no denying that these past two years have been testing for all of us, but she seems to have come through it all with her optimism intact.

“As much as you sometimes want to be grim, you want to be down and depressed, it’s just like, you know what? It’s not really going to solve or help the situation. So I might as well find a positive in it anyway, and just get on with life.”

The Roots of Ibibio Sound Machine

Born in London, the singer spent her childhood in south-east Nigeria in an Ibibio community, and it’s there that she found the inspiration for Ibibio Sound Machine’s unique selling point.

Ibibio Sound Machine (photo: Jeremy De Luna)

The eight-piece – featuring Williams (vocals), Alfred Kari Bannerman (guitar), Anselmo Netto (percussion), José Joyette (drums), Derrick McIntyre (bass), Tony Hayden (trombone, synth), Scott Baylis (trumpet, synth) and Max Grunhard (saxophone, synth) – first made a name for themselves setting the traditional Nigerian folk tales that she grew up with to music that draws on everything from Afrobeat and highlife to electro, modern post-punk and disco.

Light in the Darkness

Her perpetual positivity has been a mainstay in the band’s three previous studio albums, even when the subject matter at hand rendered that optimism near-impossible.

I’m referring to ‘Give Me a Reason’ from their second record, Uyai, which addresses the kidnapping of 276 Chibok schoolgirls by Boko Haram in a contrarily upbeat song.

Does she make light of the situation? Well, in a way, yes – but not in the sense that phrase might suggest.

The song is not about the gravity of what happened, which weighed very heavily on Williams; it’s about her ability to find the light in even the darkest of circumstances.

“That’s something I think as Westerners we can learn from the African mentality,” says Max Grunhard, Australian-born, London-based producer, saxophonist and synth player, who started the band with Williams back in 2013.

“I mean, there’s a lot of bad things happening everywhere in the world – and in Africa, possibly worse than some other places – but I think there’s a certain mentality of ‘just get on with it and be positive’.”

Electricity

It’s this attitude that has got the group to where they are today, so it’s fair to say I was a little surprised when I had a listen to their upcoming album, Electricity, and was greeted by something darker, edgier.

We’re talking by degrees here – every track still has that dance-inducing groove that Ibibio Sound Machine are known for – but there is an undeniable tension perceptible through those driving beats, which is something new for the group.

Ibibio Sound Machine (photo: Graham Perowne)

This, they tell me, reflects the tone of the last two years, the turbulence of the pandemic, and “the world just being thrown into chaos,” as Williams puts it.

“[We were] trying to make sense of everything,” she explains. “We’d all been thrown into this pandemonium… But I think, because music is our way of finding release, that kept us going at the time – just being able to write, being able to create music.”

Describing what felt like a dark cloud hanging over them, the band explain that the album ended up acting as a much-needed catharsis.

“A journey from the darker side towards the light,” Grunhard calls it. “Because we’re all about spreading positivity,” adds Williams.

“We were trying to find the hope in all the hopelessness.”

Universal Language

When I ask her what she thinks draws people to their music, Williams doesn’t hesitate.

“I think it’s the uniqueness. The fact that the songs are not in English.”

As readers of Songlines, I imagine we are all united on the appeal of listening to music in a language you don’t understand.

There is an innate freedom in being able to interpret the song for yourself; meaning is left up to the imagination, or maybe the music even speaks to feelings that we would never have been able to put into words ourselves anyway.

She calls it a universal language. But, as Grunhard admits, that mysterious element does come at a price. “There’s a problem with crossing over to larger audiences, in that no one can understand the words. [It’s] a problem for world music overall.”

Watch Ibibio Sound Machine 'Protection From Evil':

This might explain why Electricity features far more English on it than their previous records.

Maybe it’s an inevitable progression; their self-titled first album, after all, was based exclusively on Nigerian folk tales, but with only a finite number of those stories to draw on it would have been a rigid mould to stick to.

“I feel like, as musicians, you’re able to say a lot of things that people sometimes talk about but can’t actually express their views about” says Williams.

“And what better way to do that than to put it in music?” But it seems the question facing the band more recently has been, how many people do they want to understand that message?

By adding more English alongside the Ibibio on Electricity, Williams has opened up a new level of communication with her audience.

But what has that meant for her composition? Turns out her Ibibio roots are still just as strong, in a much deeper, more fascinating way than might be expected.

The Root of Melody

Ibibio is a tonal language, meaning that a change in the pitch or inflection of a word can completely change its meaning.

The result is a language that sounds, as Grunhard puts it, “sing-songy.” To sing in the language means that sometimes there is no choice but to make the melody rise, or fall, in order to keep the message intact.

“A lot of the phrases would start in Ibibio, and then we’d have to transcribe it,” Williams says, speaking about their songwriting process.

“But because of that melodic sound, it’s kind of easy then to lend the sound, the melody, the rhythm, to the English phrase.”

Even for the lines she writes in English, Ibibio still remains the most powerful weapon in Williams’ compositional arsenal.

Imagine, a language that instinctively guides the melody, up and down, the words almost writing themselves into music.

As someone who can’t speak a tonal language, perhaps I’m romanticising it, but what is clear when talking to both of them, is that Ibibio is their greatest source of inspiration.

“Eno has a really amazing knack for melody in Ibibio,” Grunhard says. “And that’s maybe what gives it something unique, because there’s something about the language that doesn’t translate. You can’t do it in English. You can’t come up with melodies.”

Back to Nigeria

Despite the success they’ve had touring their unique sound across the UK, Europe and the US, Ibibio Sound Machine haven’t yet been able to perform their music in Nigeria.

It’s not for lack of trying, Grunhard tells me. “We have almost gone a couple of times…” Williams finishes his thought: “But it just didn’t happen. Hopefully we’ll get to go really soon.”

This hasn’t stopped Williams from connecting with an audience of Ibibio speakers though. “A guy approached me who’s actually just started a charity called Bring Back Our Languages. He had heard about the music, and he was so excited,” she says.

“So they’re all listening to the music, and they can’t believe this. They’re hearing the Ibibio language spoken far afield. It’s not being spoken in Nigeria, but in places they wouldn’t even imagine that people would be trying to dance and sing along to the language.”

As she tells it, Ibibio suffered greatly as a result of colonialism.

“It sort of died away, and people were not really bothered whether they spoke the language or not.” With written resources a scarcity, she describes having very little to go on besides her own memories when she was putting the folktales of her childhood to paper.

“There was really not that much. And so it was the case of just asking people, asking family members… there hasn’t been much documented over the years.”

But thanks to recent initiatives, including the aforementioned charity, the work of numerous Ibibio scholars on the Ibibio Bible project (it’s first ever translation into the vernacular, completed in 2020), and Williams’ own work, the efforts to protect and preserve this language are finally getting some recognition.

It’s no small feat, but luckily for Williams it turns out carrying the torch runs in her blood.

“Before she passed, my grandma used to tease me a lot, because I would sing in English, and she was like, ‘When are you ever going to sing in Ibibio?’ She was very much for keeping language culture alive, even though she spent a lot of her time in the West… I remember thinking about that, and thinking: as a people, you can’t lose your identity. Even if you go far afield, you still have to remember your heritage; you have to know where you come from.”

The band are busy gearing up for a UK tour, but beyond that they’ve already got one eye on the horizon, scanning for their next challenge.

After two years of COVID-constrained recording, it sounds like they have their sights set on some travel.

“There’s a lot of forward-thinking sounds coming out of Africa at the moment,” says Grunhard.

“I think the internet has really helped… And it’s easier for people over there to get their music out. It would be really cool to go and record over there. That’s one thing we’d like to do at some point.”

Hyper-Productivity

Less than a decade after they first formed and Ibibio Sound Machine already have four albums under their belt with no plans of slowing down.

How on earth do they manage to produce so much music so fast, I ask. “If I’m honest I’d like to release more than that. I wanna put out an album every year,” Grunhard tells me. “As far as I’m aware, most musicians would usually rather put out a lot more music,” but, he explains “two years is the minimum time most labels wait to put out another album.”

Williams describes it as a “metamorphosis” – the writing, recording, producing, publicising and touring life cycle of an album, and then actually giving people time to listen to it before the next one crops up.

“Doing it every year, I think it would probably diminish the whole value of putting stuff out.”

“That horse has definitely bolted already,” Grunhard argues, as the discussion descends into a reminiscence on the ‘golden age’ of music, which, according to some of his musical predecessors, is already behind us.

“I read somewhere that Spotify is uploading like 60,000 new albums a week, which I find hard to believe. It’s crazy… I remember buying vinyl when I was a kid, and that was the way to buy music. It’s so different now… My daughter, for example, she’d never dream of listening to a whole album. That’s a completely foreign concept.”

“I know! Everything’s all about swiping,” Williams chimes in, laughing.

“Taking photos of yourself and putting it on TikTok is far more interesting than listening to a record,” Grunhard mumbles.

Let’s hope he’s wrong about that.

Although an album a year is firmly off the table, at least we know our supply of Ibibio Sound Machine music won’t be drying up anytime soon.

And as for the golden age of music being behind us… perhaps getting your hands on a new album is not as novel as it once was, but bands like Ibibio Sound Machine are living proof that the increased accessibility of music from all over the world has brought with it some remarkable fusions and genres that would have been unthinkable just a few decades ago.

All I’ll say on the matter is, assuming you can stay off TikTok for long enough to do so, it would be well worth your time listening to Electricity in its entirety.

This article originally appeared in the April 2022 issue of Songlines magazine. Never miss an issue – subscribe today