On worldbuilding & the surreal

For a long time I resisted the word 'worldbuilding'. It felt too clean for what actually happens in a session — the mess of loops, half-lyrics, screenshots pinned to the wall, the studio smelling like burnt coffee. But the more I zoomed out, the clearer it became: every song is a doorway into the same imagined place.

The imaginary is a real place

Growing up between Nigeria and the internet, I never really believed in one 'home'. Home was a stitched-together thing — a Lagos market on Tuesday, a Discord server on Wednesday, a memory of my grandmother's compound on Sunday. The surreal isn't an escape from that; it's the only honest way to describe it.

Rules I keep coming back to

• Every song is a room in the same house.
• The 'weird' choice is usually the honest one.
• If it sounds too much like a reference, cut it.
• Silence is a texture, not a mistake.

CLOCKIT. started as a joke — a voice memo I sent a friend at 3am. What made it into the record was almost exactly that voice memo, sped up and buried under an ambient pad. The trick wasn't polishing it. The trick was trusting it.

"the surreal is the most honest tool we have."

— studio wall, taped over the monitor

So — worldbuilding, for me, isn't a masterplan. It's the discipline of noticing the doorways when they appear, and being brave enough to walk through them on record.