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First Fridays Online ft. Chino Amobi (NON) and Johnny Utterback
ICA Miami proudly welcomes experimental producer and NON founder Chino Amobi and designer Johnny Utterback to First Fridays, who will premiere a new musical collaboration. Through his work with NON, a record label dedicated to supporting Afro-diasporic cultural production, Chino Amobi has become a leading force in experimental music. Multidisciplinary artist Nicholas G. Padilla will support.
About Chino Amobi
Born from parents of Nigerian descent, Chino Amobi’s vision with NON WORLDWIDE was to break down long-standing Eurocentric perceptions of dance and experimental music—focusing instead on musicians who are either African or of the African diaspora—and letting the producers and singers have direct ownership over what is theirs, bending music-industry rules that are still largely colonial. It’s a political label, for sure, but the music itself sounds like nothing else. After all, “bass music” has become its own blanket term for almost any sort of club music, and while most of NON’s output could light the floor up like matches and gasoline, very little of it is easily classifiable or delineated by genre. Because like Amobi’s own lineage, NON’s music is first generation—born out of histories and bloodlines given little voice before.
About Johnny Utterback
Johnny Utterback is an art director by trade who has dabbled in audio as an outlet for over a decade. Under the moniker Counterspark, Johnny was primarily focused on ambient electronica. In his career as a sound artist, his work has been featured in a variety of documentaries and short films. Most recently he did the soundtrack for “The Builder,” an award-winning documentary that is currently being shown at film festivals around the world. Johnny has also done several remixes for a variety of artists and is featured on Chino Amobi’s album PARADISO. Chino and Johnny have been collaborating since 2012 across all forms of media, from sound, photography, video, and design.