In the past two years, Eno Williams has picked up enough new hobbies to fill a medium-sized rec center: roller skating, tennis, textile design, making custom lamps. That’s in addition to her role as the charismatic frontwoman for the eight-piece London dance band Ibibio Sound Machine, whose high-energy tracks merge elements of contemporary electronic and UK club music with classic Afrobeat and highlife. It’s a cross-cultural connection that’s deeply personal for Williams, who was born in England and moved as a child to join family among the Ibibio people of southeastern Nigeria, before returning to London as a young adult.
The group’s spectacular fourth album, Electricity, was produced alongside members of Hot Chip, who helped the Sound Machine tap into an even more powerful and emphatic presence on record. Their thunderous synths now feel like they have their own gravitational field, and Williams’ voice rings out as if from the top of a mountain. This is music that summons a crowd to join together in celebration—just the thing that’s been hardest to come by over the past two years.
Working in London through the spring and fall of 2020, Ibibio Sound Machine were profoundly affected by the year’s tumult: first, the isolation of pandemic lockdown, then the collective grief and international protest spurred by the murder of George Floyd. Williams’ lyrics approach these heavy topics obliquely, but they’re never far from the surface. On the title track, she weighs the relative significance of watchwords like “equality” and “emergency” against the true universal language: love.
Subliminal messaging is an Ibibio Sound Machine speciality. Since Williams often writes lyrics in Ibibio—a localized language even within Nigeria—the group has spent years thinking about how best to communicate to audiences unlikely to understand her words literally. On Electricity, the message is one of irrepressible optimism in the face of galvanizing challenges. “For any normal person, after a while, you think, I just can’t carry on any more,” Williams says over a video call. “So our mandate was to just be hopeful, to try to find that inner strength.”
Here, Williams and Ibibio’s musical director and saxophonist Max Grunhard discuss the people, instruments, and creative distractions that helped them carry on making Electricity.
Eno Williams: During lockdown, a friend of mine was like, “I probably should start roller skating.” I was like, “I’m probably too old for that. If I fall and break my hip, that’s it.” I’d never tried it before. But I bought skates and watched a few YouTube videos. I went to the park and bumped into a skate community there, and everybody was so encouraging. Every time I had a little bit of spare time outside of writing and doing other stuff, I was like, “I’m gonna practice.” I’d go back and forth, back and forth, and got rid of the fear. And then I really got into it and started enjoying it. I’ve been going since then.
I’ve done the going backwards, the dipping backwards, the crazy legs, dancing. I saw all these videos trending on Instagram and TikTok and I thought, Oh, that looks really cool. My target was being able to skate well enough to do it in a video maybe. And we did get to do it on our video for “Protection From Evil,” so I was able to tick that off my bucket list.
Max Grunhard: She wants to try roller-skating in gigs. But everyone’s basically said no so far.
Williams: I had this big idea that I’m gonna put on some bat wings and get roller skates on and then rock up on stage. My manager was like, “Nooo, I don’t think you’ve got insurance!”
Williams: I’ve used a lot of African print in our costuming because of my heritage, and one time I used it to upgrade an old lamp that we had for the merchandise table. And then people kept trying to buy the lamp! I was like, “No, no, we need it.” And they’re like, “Well, can you make us one?”
I had a whole lot of fabrics in my trunk, so I started making different pieces. Sometimes when I needed to find inspiration, I’d let something play in the background and try to make something.
Grunhard: She started a little business making lamps.
Williams: Well, I did after that ’cause I had so many! The whole living room was full of them. So we had a pop-up, and we did some London street markets, just taking it out there to spread the love.
Grunhard: Not all inspiring things are positive. There were so many negatives that inspired the last couple of years creatively.
Williams: COVID tests were a part of our everyday. It tied into the writing process as well, because we couldn’t see everyone that we would normally write with.
Grunhard: When we were in the studio with Hot Chip, you had to go by all these rules—who’s allowed to meet and how many people can be together.
Williams: It was standard: As long as you had your test, then you can go and mix in a bubble that day.
Grunhard: We’re really into the idea of the synth meeting heavy percussive stuff. It was the specific idea behind the song “Electricity”: What if we took an Afrobeat drum beat and put it with a Giorgio Moroder type of arpeggiated synthesizer? I hadn’t really heard too much of that having been done.
Williams: We were in the studio and seeing the news coming in on our phones. People were sending all this video footage about the police. It was so visual, the whole thing. I remember seeing it, and I was shocked, in horror, like, This can’t be real. It got me wondering why we have to live like that in today’s time, why things are the way they are still. As if things couldn’t get worse—we were dealing with a pandemic and then this. It brought a sadness, and just compounded the darkness in our writing process.
“Protection From Evil” was definitely inspired by that, because there’s so much negativity and evil right now. We need some kind of force to protect us. That song starts with this speaking-in-tongues chant, like a prayer to protect us from the evil that we were facing at the time, and are still facing.
Grunhard: I started buying these weird little old keyboards to keep myself occupied. We were just messing around on them at home. They’re really small and they make weird, blippy 1980s electronic sounds. A few of the tunes started on those keyboards and then evolved in the studio. Some songs didn’t exactly change that much, but others changed a hell of a lot. That was one of the good things about working with Hot Chip on the production—they made elements of our ideas sound a lot bigger.
Williams: “Casio (Yak Nda Nda)” started with the Casio machine. We were just twiddling sounds, finding drum samples. I tried messing around with everything: synths, piano, keyboards, theremin.
Grunhard: The creative vibe at the time was like: Who knows if the music industry’s even gonna come back from this? So we may as well just have fun. And you can have a lot of fun with esoteric synths with little pre-programmed things in them.
Grunhard: That was something we were listening to from Uganda. It’s actually a guy who had a wedding band, and the music got released on a small label, Nyege Nyege Tapes. It’s way out in left field with crazy polyrhythms. I always like hearing things that I haven’t heard before.
Williams: It’s not in your normal musical timing because with African music, everything’s just like, out there.
Williams: Our label Merge asked us to record “Color in Your Cheeks” for a Mountain Goats covers compilation, and I really enjoyed singing it. It’s just the warmness of the song and the tone, the simplicity as well. I ended up singing in English, but transcribing it to Ibibio and then trying to fit the melody was quite interesting. I just loved it, and it inspired me to start thinking of writing some of our stuff in English as well.
Songwriting in English and in Ibibio are so different. Ibibio is more rhythmic, more tonal, so there’s ups and downs. It’s usually not constant like the English language. One word in English might be a few phrases in Ibibio, so that would change the melody. When I write in Ibibio and then translate, I might double up or extend the word to try and keep the rhythmic Ibibio melody in English.
Grunhard: It’s a constant thing with our band that no one can understand a lot of the lyrics, so it’s like trying to get across to people what you’re saying without them necessarily understanding it in a linguistic sense. We haven’t listened to a vast amount of the Mountain Goats’ music, but we really like that song. It felt like something interesting in our process—that guy is a really good songwriter in English, so it was something that we could learn from. It’s a different way of reaching people for us.
Grunhard: We kept coming across him because we went to North Carolina and stayed in this amazing place, sort of a Buddhist retreat up in the mountains, and visited the Moog factory in Asheville.
Williams: I just went crazy. I was like a kid in a sweet shop.
Grunhard: Moog is a super inspiring guy. I’ve been into his synths and stuff for a long time. And then we got to use the original Moog modular synth in Hot Chip’s studio. It’s enormous, it takes up a whole wall. I wish I had one—it costs like $35,000. It’s a proper rockstar type of synth and such an incredible piece of gear. Like the sound of it—
Williams: It just hits you. Something could go from so small-sounding to so big in the space of a few hours of just putting this here and there.
Williams: It was a celebratory meal that my grandmother or my mom would make, usually at Christmas time or someone’s birthday party. The process of making it is quite rigorous—over here you can use coconut milk in a tin, but growing up you had to get the actual coconut, crack it up, get the water out of the coconut, grate the coconut, squeeze the juice out of the grated coconut, squeeze the milk out, and then cook the rice in that coconut milk with some spices. That’s the real authentic coconut rice.
So I made that with coconut shrimp sauce, and then my sister made some jollof rice and stew. The guys from Hot Chip had never had anything like that before, so they were quite chuffed. It was a Friday after we’d done such a long week and then we all just ate to our hearts’ content.
