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As the average piece of recorded music has gotten louder, wilder, and everything-er in the digital era, sound collages have blossomed. The 2020s have been full of young artists whose brains were rewired by E+E, Chuquimamani-Condori’s early alias for sputtering patchworks of Latin electronica, and revel in semioblitz bliss. This music isn’t about overload or unholy collisions for the sake of it; it’s bound together by an autobiographical thread, where the disparate sounds intentionally express elements of their ideology and reveal something about the way they experience the world. They’re channeling the private anxieties, joys, and memories of their communities—be it Venezuelan teens pining for a better future, alienated queer kids, or young Black friends.
Among this generation’s finest is a 20-year-old computer science and fashion design student named Chidi Obialo, or heavensouls. He’s in a duo with his buddy stickerbush called the Sidepeices. Their breakout project was last year’s Darkskin Niggas With Lightskin Problems. Call it a virtuous data dump: It’s hectic IDM (Intimate Discord Memories) by two sincere shitposters who’ve been on the internet long enough to know exactly how to skewer it. One song, “Fuck a Stimulus I Need My Shit in Blood,” was themed around mocking a Hasan Piker stan. This year, heavensouls dropped westside trapped, a showcase of plundersymphonic finesse and a tribute to Nigerian beats. His new album-length EP, cantu of the sower, merges these musical tabs into a collage of collages. He’s applying the dizzy logic of free jazz to shivery microsounds and making horn- and string-accompanied compositions for the conservatory freaks to dance to.
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Obialo has lived a peripatetic life, from growing up in Nigeria, being unhoused at one point, to moving to the suburbs and becoming hyperliterate in niche genres via internet forums. The record sounds like he’s expelling a lifetime’s worth of moving between digital and physical rabbit holes. The nearly nine-minute “today is my favorite” is a monument to motion, heaving and sighing like a windstream carrying thousands of tiny pearls. There are rippling gasps, drums, strings, sax, a vaguely Latin guitar, a sample of a woman talking about getting her hair done. Obialo silences certain layers while modulating others, nestling rhythms like honeycombs. After maybe 10,000 individual motes of noise that chatter like mouse clicks, the song ends with a slow, jangly fadeout. These sounds are strange bedfellows, but the delirium rarely feels indulgent or trivial. It’s optimized for wistful beauty, like a fried cousin of upsammy’s plinky pastoralism that wants to soothe and electrify at the same time. It feels like new emotional terrain—a kind of serene garden watered into being atop a life thronged with stimuli.
Obialo has said this EP was inspired by the claustrophobia he once felt in high school when he was walking through a suburb full of identical homes. You can read cantu of the sower’s keyspamming of genres and rhythms as a reaction to a specific American way of life, where people dream of unchanging small-town existence, never questioning the status quo. Obialo’s westside trapped was partly inspired by seeing the U.S. government bomb Nigeria in 2025, and what’s basically this EP’s first line of audible dialogue is a call to arms: “I want my liberation more than I want anything else,” goes a sample of a speech on “model housing.” It goes on: “Capitalism, which is the economic system that has dominated America since its beginning, is a backwards, stupid, vicious, barbaric—and we want to further say that this system is going to fail.”
You can also read the ideology of the EP as a reaction to a specific type of experimental music that is frustratingly didactic, conceptual, or unwilling to get dancey and dorky. There’s nothing off limits here, nothing too garish to clash with saxophone and strings. “star balcony” floods the concert hall with EDM. “model housing” has so many ideas it could be an EP on its own, including a wiggy chiptune climax, guitars subsumed in fire and guitars that chirrup like a nervous salamander saying hey!, and a sample of the Bronx MC Joe Lite declaring, “My shit too real, these motherfuckers faking/I’m running out of patience.” It makes me imagine a younger Obialo watching battle rap videos and beat tutorials. Although there’s nothing explicitly internet-y about this EP, the digital is present as a background chorus. Weaving every movement together are barely perceptible particles that make your ears blink and double-take—bubbles, dolphin gurgles, memory chips fidgeting, sprites hiccuping. And they never feel abrasive because they’re soft and puny, like dust particles inside a DAW, or the room noise of a CS:GO lobby.
Maybe because Obialo wanted to prove to himself that he could get it done through raw synthesis and his friends alone, cantu goes light on samples; there is no glorious moment when heavensouls disses FL Studio bootlickers while Lizzy Mercier Descloux yips over mutant disco like on 2025’s “darkskin harmonizing.” Instead, he recruits indie musicians like Liam Aldous (guitar on “today is my favorite”) and Your Arms Are My Cocoon’s Alyssa Mandel, whose sax searches for air amid the crystal blizzard of percussion on “group working,” which builds to one of the few moments on the tape that feels too rhythmically congested. But nothing is really delineated; it’s difficult to tell when visitors arrive and when analog instruments give way to VSTs and samples, which adds to the sense of being pleasurably disoriented.
When there’s humor, it’s tinged with anxiety and longing. “Niggas on DistroKid rappin’/Bitch, I’m in the fields trappin’,” Obialo moans on “group working.” It’s tempting to call this the EP’s emotional centerpiece, since it foregrounds his voice—two of them, in fact, as he duets with a squeak and a roar—and places him on the cusp of something grand. He’s riding the E train with your girl, seeing visions of “frantic motions in the dust,” and stacking paper while running from foes. “Been prayin’ for so long one day I’ll make it on that runway,” he cries.
The lack of levity doesn’t feel like an absence—his goofy stickerbush collaborations satisfy a certain sampladelic craving, while cantu of the sower pleases the side of me that likes to hit play and let the intangible morass of sound spawn images behind my eyes. “shipping times and quiet streets,” the only tune with stickerbush, unravels with solemn grace. The second half of “model housing” is a bedazzled René Lalique comb, a winged insect of a composition. “group working” wants to do everything at once, a manic striver who tries to distract from his inner turmoil until he can’t help it anymore. At the center of it all is heavensouls, who by the end feels less like the conductor of a mad orchestra than a mediator brokering peace between warring nations: shiny percussion and dusty saxophone, “experimental” music and stimboard diary entries, digital hell and earthly paradise.
