INTERVIEW BY ELYON

Tochi is currently seated in my living room, enjoying the Capri-Sonne and chin chin I offered when he arrived. He seems quite pleased, though slightly disappointed to pause his snack so we can properly begin the interview.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY EMMANUEL BELLO

Slowly Then All at Once

“I’m currently working on an EP to come out soon. It’s actually finished but I’m working on a lot of content around it right now. It’s called slowly then all at once. I can’t say when exactly the project is coming out, but songs from the project will start coming out as soon as a month from now [June].”

He Is an Engineer

“Honestly I would just describe myself as an engineer. That’s the best way to describe it. Everything I do centers around engineering, whether it’s sound, software, I’m always engineering shit. But to be clear, I am a music producer, artiste and software engineer. I have my hands in all those pots.”

Sound Designing His Own Video Games

“Production was my first entry point into music. So I used to make games and trying to make sounds for those games was where I found FL Studio. That’s how I got into that. I was in year 9 learning basic programming. I unfortunately don’t make games anymore but I didn’t discard the skill — it just kinda simmered into the more regular software engineering that I do right now which is web dev and systems programming.”

Where His Creative and Professional Careers Collide

“My engineering in my corporate and artistic worlds do merge. I lead engineering at Offtop right now, it’s actually a music and tech company, so they merge quite a lot.”

A Day in the Life at Corporate

“If I’m working on a big feature, that means about two to three weeks of very focused work on that thing. Sometimes I’ll help fix some things outside of the scope of what I’m working on. But it’s usually a very focused couple of weeks trying to spec out a new feature, talk to some users, get user feedback, because the users are musicians as well. Then I’ll talk to the team, build out a design that feels good, and works well, then start actually writing the code.”

Becoming a Full-Time Producer and Artiste

“I used to go to sessions with my friend Abstract. I was in Unilag at the time because I did a year there before going to my next school [Covenant]. We used to go to sessions every Friday, and this would be an overnight thing, we’d get there at 11pm and stay till the next morning. So when everyone would be done recording and sleeping at around 3/4am, I’d start recording one or two things. After a while I got pretty confident with the way I was sounding and I was very experimental with it. I started proper producing in 2016, but I’d say the transition between that and when I actually started recording music was 2018. That was when I actually recorded something that I released… it’s called 2018.”

Writing vs. Recording

“I don’t enjoy writing. I like the process of recording. I just don’t like the having to come up with lyrics part. During the day when I’m driving, I’ll have lyrics that come up in my head and I’ll write it down. I have a note pulls phone out to show note where I write down everything. So on that note, is a very long list of bars. The way I record is, I’ll come up with a melody and then I’ll start putting in the words, so I’m kind of writing as I’m recording. I wouldn’t really say it’s freestyling because I’m very bad at freestyling. Then sometimes something from that note will fit right into what I’m saying and I just put it there. Coming up with lyrics is my least enjoyable process but if I’m having fun doing it you can tell by how the song sounds.”

Feeling More Like an Artiste Now

“I definitely do. Because I hop on way more people’s beats than mine. That would surprise a lot of people. But right now in my life, I feel like it would be pretty irresponsible of me to exclusively hop on my beats. If I felt like I was producing what was best for me, then sure. But I feel like there are so many talented people out there sending me stuff daily. If I pull out my laptop right now, there are people that send me stuff on a weekly basis, and I’m talking 15 beats in one folder, every week. Different folders, some people send it every two days. So it would be irresponsible of me to make a beat for myself every day. I still make beats and offer them to people, but when I sit down to record, I’m most likely looking through other people’s beats first before I even look through my own.”

The rest of the story lives in print.

read the full interview in CTRL+ALT+SYNC issue 01

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Creative Direction, Interview & BTS by Elyon
Photography by Emmanuel Bello
Styling & BTS Edit by Manny Okenye
Production by CTRL+ALT+SYNC Magazine