Listening Today: Simple. So Very Good.
By Rafi Mercer
This morning I didn’t want complexity.
No grand theory. No cultural excavation. No architectural metaphor about sound and space.
Just a record.
I put on Who Is William Onyeabor? by William Onyeabor and within thirty seconds I felt it — that rare sensation when something is so simple it becomes profound.
A drum machine.
A synth bassline.
A voice repeating a phrase without drama.
That’s it.
And yet it holds.
There’s something deeply confident about music that doesn’t try too hard. The groove in “Fantastic Man” doesn’t twist itself into cleverness. It just sits there — mechanical, steady, unapologetic. The bassline pulses like a heartbeat you don’t question. The synth chords shimmer just enough to keep the air alive.
Listening today, I realised how often we chase complication. More layers. More meaning. More references. As if depth only exists when things are dense.
Onyeabor proves the opposite.
Repetition becomes meditation.
Minimalism becomes momentum.
Space becomes strength.
You start to hear the discipline inside the simplicity. The restraint. The belief that the groove is enough.
And maybe that’s the lesson for today.
Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do — in music, in work, in life — is remove the unnecessary.
Let the bassline carry it.
Let the rhythm repeat.
Let the idea breathe.
Nigeria’s listening culture is often loud, communal, kinetic. But this record shows another current running underneath: introspective futurism. A man in a studio in eastern Nigeria in the 1980s, building electronic soul with conviction, not waiting for approval.
Listening today felt clean.
Not nostalgic. Not ironic. Just good.
The kind of good that reminds you why you started caring about sound in the first place.
No algorithm needed.
No commentary required.
Just groove.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters.
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