Wayne Snow

Wayne Snow, a Progressive R&B performer equally at home with atmospheric ballads, swampy funk grooves, and raw house tracks, was born in Nigeria and later settled in Berlin. He surfaced during the mid-2010s through an initial string of partnerships with producer and multi-instrumentalist Max Graef, issuing several short releases both as a featured vocalist and under his own name before delivering the full-length debut Freedom TV on Tartelet in 2017. His follow-up, the lighter Figurine on Roche Musique in 2021, placed greater emphasis on his upper vocal register while extending an ongoing series of one-off studio sessions and further joint work alongside Graef and Neue Grafik.

Raised in Paris after his Nigerian birth, Kesiena Ukochovbara absorbed vintage soul within the family home and later took up guitar and piano, began composing original material, and performed with a classic-rock group. Exposure to Aretha Franklin recordings revealed his falsetto capability, prompting closer study of soul-inflected contemporary R&B figures such as D'Angelo and Musiq Soulchild. Feeling restricted in France to a Nigerian-artist identity and drawn to electronic music as a Black creative tradition, he moved to Berlin in 2013, where he sensed greater artistic freedom. Introduced by Julius Conrad to Max Graef during the latter’s work on the 2014 album Rivers of the Red Planet, Snow supplied co-writing and vocal contributions to two tracks; eager to establish an independent profile, he and Graef assembled the debut EP Red Runner, which appeared only months after Rivers of the Red Planet.

Over the ensuing years Snow’s collaborative and solo activity increased. He issued the Rosie EP, joined Darius on the single “Helios,” and lent support to Mop Mop and Neue Grafik, among others. These efforts culminated in the March 2017 release of Freedom TV, named for guerrilla fighter, activist, and poet Freedom T.V. Nyamubaya, with co-production input from Max Graef, Neue Grafik, and Nu Guinea. Several months afterward “Rosie” was selected for the twelfth volume of Brownswood Bubblers, the compilation series curated by BBC DJ Gilles Peterson, an early prominent advocate. In the interval before his next album Snow maintained an active role alongside Darius and Neue Grafik as well as numerous additional artists including FKJ, Folamour, and Zeitgeist Freedom Energy Exchange; Figurine, his sophomore album, arrived in September 2021.