Producer, vocalist, multi-instrumentalist and DJ Coby Sey is someone whose work has been quietly integral to the UK’s left-field, underground sonics for the past five years or so. The Lewisham artist’s collaborations with other forward thinkers including Tirzah, Mica Levi, Dean Blunt, Kelly Lee Owens and others is testament to the organic and expansive world in which he operates. Along with Levi and Brother May, Sey also runs Curl Recordings; the trio sometimes perform shows together purely via jamming and improvisation.
You can hear that exploratory approach on Conduit, Sey’s debut album, which came out in September. The record brings to life a space that is often uneasy, examining histories, politics and protest alongside something more frank and interior (on standout tracks such as the raw, galvanising Response, he offers: “I’m the one you get aroused by / In the mind and in the nether regions inside”). Sey’s zigzagging spoken word and unpolished melodies sit somewhere at the confluence of a multitude of genres (jazz, dub, noise, experimental electronic, trip-hop; his sound has sometimes been categorised as “post-grime”).
With music that embodies both hope and despair, often in the same breath, Sey explained to the Quietus online magazine his desire to make work that sits outside the binary of positive and negative: “I think thereis a wider palette of emotions that can be explored through sound and music.” It’s something he manages quite beautifully: in Sey’s work, you sit with the strange, imperfect edges of feeling it all.
Conduit is out now on AD 93. Coby Sey will play at the Pitchfork music festival, London, on 9 November
