On the occasion of this summer’s Diamond Life album listening sessions at MONO SPACE, held on July 31st and August 1st, Juma Sei and Free Oribhabor met to discuss The Record Club—Oribhabor’s ongoing deep listening series, his musical inspirations, and the historical and communal aspects of high fidelity listening
INTRODUCTION
The hardest part of having a big vision is holding space for the gap between that vision and reality. But pressure makes diamonds. According to Free Oribhabor that’s how he started The Record Club. He introduced his LA-based listening experience to Portland earlier this summer.
Free mostly celebrates trailblazers—those who fight to preserve the integrity of their art. Frank Ocean, Stevie Wonder, Janet and Michael Jackson are good examples. But Sade is one of the best. Diamond Life, the London band’s 1984 debut, transformed the recording industry and the radio charts.
Free fully outlined this history at Mono Space.
“Sade means pride and glory in the Yoruba language,” starts Helen Folasade Adu in a grainy interview clip that fills the room.
Free goes on to tell us that Sade—the band—was born from jam sessions in an old fire station where Adu lived at the time. Adu and her friend Stuart Matthewman—Sade’s eventual guitarist and saxophonist—would pour over legends like Curtis Mayfield as they crafted the foundation for their sound: soulful and clean.
“It was super minimal at the time and everything else was excessive,” he says, using “Friday I’m In Love,” and “Shout to the Top” as foil. “[Sade] were the antithesis of everything that was happening in British music at the time.”
But this individuality made record labels hesitant to sign-on. Then came a night in Heaven.
Leveraging their connections in London’s arts and culture scene, Sade landed The Face of 1984. The band booked a coinciding gig at Heaven nightclub and invited every culture critic they could.
Over 1,000 people attended; 1,000 others were turned away. Sade signed a deal with Epic Records in short order.
By the time Free finished his story, the room buzzed with eager anticipation. It was as if we, ourselves, were waiting outside Heaven, praying for a glimpse at Sade.
Free paused for a moment, then dropped the needle.
I could feel everyone take a deep breath. We closed our eyes, and opened our ears.
Photograph by Kevin Horstmann
JUMA SEI
I appreciated that you started your listening session with context. What’s yours?
Free Oribhabor
I’ve always been a big fan of stories. I’ll watch a film and for the rest of the day I’m watching every interview and podcast I can find, because I want to be fully enveloped in that world. I try to find ways to bring pieces of that to music . . . Record Club is just about getting people off their phones, out of their heads, and into the music. Presenting the record as this fine piece art and giving a story that leads you into it makes you lock-in and engage.
I was struck by the depth of your research. It seems like that’s inborn?
I've always been into all the nerdy details. I remember when I was a kid, my dad would play certain records and be like, “Here's what this lyric means!” or, “It was recorded at this place!” I'm also a musician myself. I've been making music since I was 15 years old. As a producer, you’re always trying to inject yourself with as much inspiration as possible.
How did you figure out what you wanted The Record Club to be?
Sometimes you have an idea that you haven’t fully realized. You kind of know what it is, but you still need time to cook. The first session we did, I was like, “I'm gonna pimp out my birthday and ask everyone to listen to Voodoo with me.”
Why Voodoo?
That’s my favorite album. And people actually came. But I was working with another company then and it seemed like it was about to become work. So we started from scratch and I brought it back to myself. Then we did another two nights: Endless from Frank Ocean, and Motomami from Rosalia. I decided to put all my emphasis on the Rosalia record, because it's not a record people talk about enough. Everyone left that night like, “Yo, this record is serious. Like, Rosalia is a serious artist.” That’s when I was like, “That’s it… not trying to create spectacle—just educating people on these records to bring them closer to the music."
Why is Diamond Life good for that?
First off, it just sounds so good in hi-fi. It's also a cool testament of some kids who were like, “We’re just gonna do this.” You don’t need to have all the expertise. You don’t need to be the most gifted musician. You just have to know yourself, what you want to make, and have fun doing it. That’s what they did.
Folks say that the album has a naked elegance. I think that Record Club and Mono Space have the same. What’s it been like to present it here?
In New York and in LA we do this at bars. Here, I don’t have to focus on anything but making the experience as good as possible. I don’t have to stop in between to do an intermission so we can sell more drinks. For this to be a space that is specifically built to listen to music, to me, it’s heaven. We’re not chasing spectacle. I hope this becomes the standard because these should be in more cities. Portland, I'm jealous.
I feel blessed to have access to this. I will say, it’s not an experience that I’ve had before. And it’s lowkey awkward at first.
It takes a bit of warming up. That’s why I love to do the presentation—that’s why I love to crack a joke: to let people know that like, “Yo, I’m not serious.” The music is serious and I really do care about this, deeply. But relax.
I feel like you modeled that well. After side 2, I told a friend it felt like curtains closing at a theater.
It 100% does. Music is an art and we listen to it in passing all the time. What people do after I give the information and play the music is really up to them, but I notice that people talk about it. That shared experience creates community.
You’ve said it’s important that those conversations don’t just sit in nostalgia. Can you say more?
It’s just showing you that these pieces of music are timeless. Like, I drew a comparison between the story of Maxwell and the story of Sade and Quiet Storm. That’s become a style of music that a lot of people repeat to this day. I’m drawing those comparisons and showing you that this is now, this was then, this is forever.
Vinyl is having a moment right now. What do you make of that?
I think it has a lot to do with people wanting to experience and interact with physical media more. Now that you can just play something off your phone you forget about your vinyl collection. I think that we’ve come full circle. We’ve seen all these crazy things and they don’t last. I want to be able to give my record collection to my kids, just the way I stole my dad’s collection.
Photograph by Kevin Horstmann
Did your dad inspire your love for music?
He was my original music nerd. I remember seeing my dad singing Jimmy Cliff records to my mom. Every Saturday he was playing new records and telling us about it. He showed me how to experience music: you read the line notes, you get into the lyrics, and then you sing it as much as you can. You should have a relationship with the things that you love.
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