Experimental. Genre-bending. Sound sculptor. Iyanah. She’s quite a find; that’s if you find her! I mean, it’s not like she’s obscure. Not in the least, she has a decent growing stream-count on her platforms, from both her own Kenyan base & a whole host of other locations. Point is, though, she’s the kind whose sound finds you, instead of you seeking it out. It’s quite specific & so her that if you already knew of her work, it’d probably have been through happenstance of the algorithm or word of mouth from a cultured friend with fine taste.
Looped into her musical arc right from childhood, what started out as a natural hobby was catalyzed by her phase into journaling. And the journaling grew into poems, which then transformed into more layered songwriting, with time. This same trajectory is evident in her catalog, in the sense that her output chronicles her experiences and inclinations, mundane & profound, daily & over years.
For a fuller artistry, she joins those experiences to musical influences from the likes of Michael Jackson & Whitney Houston, and a dose of rock from bands like Linkin Park from her edgy teenage phase. But she insists that she’s not obsessed with any artist & simply incorporates an array of those sounds because they’ve been made present in her lived surroundings. These diverse viewpoints and artistic sources have lent her a versatility that’s present right from her psych hiphop-esque debut single “4 U” in 2021, to atmospherically sophisticated numbers like “Lose” on which she vibes with her frequent collaborator M. Rumbi.
Her latest single “Truth” (original version) came out earlier this year in May.
The vulnerability & self-aware artistic choices on it show a refined maturity to her art, which has us glued for where her next experimental adventure will take her!
