Diamond Black Hearted Boy (2009–2014) While at art school, Amobi began releasing music under the alias Diamond Black Hearted Boy. His early music was self-released through
Myspace. Amobi was quoted in a 2012
New York Times article on
seapunk, an early-2010s
subculture and
microgenre that prized aquatic aesthetics: As Diamond Black Hearted Boy, Amobi became part of an underground scene of musicians using electronic production techniques to create a subgenre of sound collage dubbed "epic collage". "Nigerian Hair," a Diamond Black Hearted Boy track, appeared on
Blasting Voices, a 2012 various-artists compilation featuring E+E (an alias of
Elysia Crampton),
James Ferraro, and
Ryan Trecartin. Amobi told
OkayAfrica he realized he had used the name as a "mask," and "I didn't want to hide behind a mask and that I wanted to claim ownership of what I was making, to be able to face someone as me without an
alter ego. In the same way that
Wangechi Mutu or
Richard Serra or
Philip Glass create, I want my work to be an extension of me." That same year, Amobi—along with the musicians Nkisi, from
London, and , from
Cape Town—co-founded NON Records (also called NON Worldwide). NON is an
independent record label dedicated to artists who are African or of the
African diaspora, with an artistic and political vision articulated in a
manifesto written by Amobi, "NON SUPPORTS ITS CITIZENS OF THE UNITED RESISTANCE". According to Matthew Trammell at
The New Yorker, Amobi's EP offered "a more explicit take on air travel" than Eno's
Music for Airports, with "buzzy synths swell into prominence like a takeoff, asymmetrical percussion mimics the metallic dance of landing gear unfolding, and talk-box samples evoke the chorus of voices, automated and analog, that echo through terminal halls." Later that year, NON held a performance at the
New Museum during
Red Bull Music Academy Festival New York. Amobi contributed to two of his friends' albums in 2016:
Elysia Crampton Presents: Demon City by Elysia Crampton and
$uccessor, the debut album of the
Sacramento, California-based producer
Fred Warmsley (aka Dedekind Cut).
Paradiso (2017–present) Amobi made his solo vinyl debut with
Minor Matter, a soundtrack accompaniment to choreographer Ligia Lewis's piece of the same name. He also announced his debut album,
Paradiso, described as "a musical epic set in a distorted Americana populated by a cast of sirens, demons, angels, imps, priests, hierophants, monsters and peasants."
The Wire praised it as "an extraordinary record: utterly grandiose, pulsing and punishing." Comparing the album's soundscape to the works of
Hieronymus Bosch and
Dante Alighieri, Power wrote "[m]odernity is Hell,
Paradiso tells us, but the only way to understand this is to embrace it fully, to stare into the void, to get on all the fairground rides, even though you already feel sick and all the colours are wrong."
The Wire named
Paradiso the release of the year in its annual critics' poll.
Rolling Stone named the album the year's third-best avant-garde release. Music by Amobi was featured in "Gidi gidi bụ ugwu eze (Unity is strength)", a short film directed by
Akinola Davies Jr. for fashion house
Kenzo. In 2018, Amobi released a short film accompaniment to
Paradiso titled
WELCOME TO PARADISO: CITY IN THE SEA. Directed by Rick Farin and rendered in
Unreal Engine 4, Amobi listed the film's influences as "The
Global South, Hieronymus Bosch's
Garden of Earthly Delights,
Timothy Morton's theories regarding hyper-objects and dark ecology after the end of the world, my experiences traveling and touring globally,
Square Enix,
Xanadu (
Citizen Kane), and the poetry of Elysia Crampton." == Selected discography ==