leggynomad
I replay this album over and over and always want to hear it in it's entirety just one more time. It's a beautiful, soul-stirring masterpiece. 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾
devy
where do i even start... udo centers itself around the concept of community without the slightest bit of cynicism. udo's community doesn't feel like value exchange or one-directional support. it feels like being held, and holding. building and being built by hands you trust. kingsley and lee go beyond using community as a tagline, and use some of the most beautiful music i've ever heard to show us what fellowship looks like as a lived experience. and i'm grateful af for that/them <3
Udo—the Igbo word for peace upon the village—is an archive of reckoning with the concept of peace itself, as it relates practically to belonging and community.
Nigerian-American dancer and singer/songwriter Kingsley Ibeneche was born, raised and is currently living in Camden, New Jersey. He has performed internationally and on national network television including SNL and MTV's VMAs, and has written, directed and choreographed works at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and The Barnes Foundation; Realms: A Soul Opera and Dear Empath, respectively. Udo is his debut album.
After working together on Realms in 2019—the culmination of years’ multidisciplinary training and work in dance and performance—Ibeneche teamed up with long-time collaborator, Philadelphia-based producer Lee Clarke, to make what would be his first full-length album as a recording artist. As the project began to take shape, Ibeneche chose the name Udo, after his father’s village in Nigeria.
Thus began what would unfurl as a multi-year process which included a long hiatus in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, and a return to the studio that winter. Ibeneche’s father passed away during the late stages of the album’s production. “You learn about a project after it’s done. My father is an ancestor now, which has changed my heart about the album,” says Ibeneche.
Udo is a record in every sense of the word: It documents the emotional experience of an empathic person who stays bound to their kin sometimes to the detriment of themselves, but who refuses to give up the quest for elation, personal peace and self-actualization in the process. This is both an ancient and extant way of existing in human relationship that will not—in fact, cannot—neglect the whole for the benefit of the individual.
Chronicling his own experience inside the tracks of Udo—on boundaries, frustration, yearning to go, dreaming and love—Ibeneche has left breadcrumbs for those seeking home in a restless and transient society.
But these songs are not maps so much as they are acknowledgments. “A lot of the time it feels like sacrifice, and it's rare to see that there’s light to it,” says Ibeneche. As it turns out, peace in the village involves generosity that is not always reciprocated, the human mind itself is a trickster, and none of us are alone.
The album’s first single, “So Kind,” is a chant to boundaries, a renunciation of excessive kindness when kindness is not what is called for and an invocation summoning a more complex, flexible reality.
But the struggle continues in “What You Want,” where Ibeneche continues to wrestle with the transactional nature of love and overwhelm in the responsibility of community. He walks the line between “the oceans of despair, and allegiance to my heart. Drowning only because I never let them know I can’t float all the time.”
Udo presents a kaleidoscopic experience of belonging that is: joy and agony, love and loathing, delight and disgust, pride and shame. Here Ibeneche has channeled this plural and often contradictory reality into sonic form, and in doing so refused an easy answer to the inescapable questions of love, loyalty and being in community.
credits
released September 16, 2022
Written and Produced by Kingsley Ibeneche & Lee Clarke
Lyrics by Kingsley Ibeneche
Mixed by Lee Clarke
Mastered by Ryan Schwabe
Cover photo by Marcus Branch
Design by Sin Weng
Liner Notes by Jessica Dore
1. Noor (intro)
Kingsley Ibeneche - vocals, percussion
Lee Clarke - wurlitzer, percussion
Bennett Kuhn - additional production
Joseph Keim - congas
Jarrett Gilgore - saxophone
2. What You Want
Kingsley Ibeneche - vocals, percussion
Lee Clarke - wurlitzer, synthesizer, guitar, drums, percussion
Joseph Keim - congas, vocals
Devin Farrell - vocals
Simon Martinez - guitar, drums
3. It Ends The Same
Kingsley Ibeneche - vocals, drums
Lee Clarke - wurlitzer, synthesizer, piano, bass, guitar, drum programming
Nappy Nina - vocals
Bennett Kuhn - marimba
Kevin Ripley - drums
4. Can I
Kingsley Ibeneche - vocals
Lee Clarke - guitar
5. So Kind
Kingsley Ibeneche - vocals, percussion
Lee Clarke - wurlitzer, synthesizer, guitar, bass, drums, percussion
Joseph Keim - congas
Devin Farrell - vocals
Kevin Ripley - drums
6. Muthr
7. Asked For Light
Kingsley Ibeneche - vocals
Lee Clarke - wurlitzer, synthesizer, piano, bass, guitar, percussion, drums, vocals
Yvette Pabon - poetry
Joseph Keim - congas
Devin Farrell - vocals
Kevin Ripley - drums
Bennett Kuhn - percussion
Kingsley Ibeneche is a Nigerian American performing artist based in Camden, New Jersey. Enticed by a vision of using
multidisciplinary creative energies to highlight social change, Ibeneche’s work aims to connect African people and the African diaspora through movement and sound. His debut album Udo was released in September 2022....more
Like so many others, this came like a bolt out of the blue and, even though it's well before payday, I had to have this astonishing album on vinyl to prove it exists. The feel of the tunes makes me feel like the Impressions do, Curtis Mayfield, the big spaces and instinctive horns and stuff drifting in and out. Great grooves and I can see lots of ghosts nodding along to this with big smiles on their faces. At last! Anthony Cottrell
in a place much worse then most music can catch in/on to, am streaming the album until the music can. have more faith in Hiatus Kaiyote as soundallies then a presenter could assume or guess. I love you all significantly, there's a mango vape, thc9 watermelon syrup and organic cigarettes if you come through however🙏🏼, I don't really have any money. BeatsaNdBuds