fbi.radio presents 'Unscripted': Ify Obiegbu in conversation with homebody

Ify Obiegbu: Good evening everyone. Welcome to the Rocks Discovery Museum. This is fbi 'Unscripted'. I am Ify Obiegbu. I'm a broadcaster and writer, a creative with fbi.radio and I'm very excited to be sitting down next to an artist whose work asked a very simple question in a surprisingly complicated way.

What does it mean to really listen?

That's also why we're here in the Rocks Discovery Museum, a place built around stories of people, place, movement, memory, and country. And I think that it's a beautiful setting for this conversation because so much of homebody's work comes from paying attention to the things that are already there. 

To give you a bio, homebody is a Wiradjuri woman from Bathurst, now living and creating in Mullumbimby, Newcastle. She first found her way into music through dance, then deejaying, then production, and has since developed a distinctive world of electronic music that can move from gritty to organic field recordings, ambient soundscapes and deeply intimate songwriting. 

Her debut EP, homebody, which was released last year listened closely to her surroundings. Now, with 'prefrontal cortex', her latest album, she's made a record that goes somewhere much more expansive, bringing ambient trip hop and breaks into a deeply reflective body of work. 

So tonight I want to talk all about the music, the places, the body, the brain, the culture, the dance floor, the quiet, and what it means to build an artistic life that actually sounds like you. homebody thank you for being here. 

I want to start with the name. homebody is an interesting name for an artist whose work is very connected to nightlife, deejaying and the dance floor. What does homebody mean to you?

homebody: when I started deejaying, I actually just used my first name Chloe. I honestly could not think of anything else. I was in a really low creative mood.

When I started to produce, when I put that EP out 'homebody', I was struggling with changing the style of my sound. And I felt changing the name would be the first step. I'm usually quite homely as a person and quite introverted. I thought, "It's staring right in front of me, the EP is my name now." I felt like I could kind of explore a bit more as homebody than as Chloe.

Ify Obiegbu: You started in dance, moved into deejaying, then production. Before you were thinking about music technically you were experiencing it physically.

How much of the producer that you are now is still the dancer? Do you still experience music like that?

homebody: Yeah, one hundred percent. It's the gateway into making sound. I feel my body responds really well to music and the dance-ability and the creativeness of the movement.

I originally was trained in contemporary and ballet, and I did that from three to twenty-one and I used to edit my own dance tracks for competitions so I think music's just always been a part of my life. 

Ify Obiegbu: As a DJ, you've built this language around propulsion and bass and rhythm, and movement, but as homebody, you're making music that asks people to stop and sit with your music and really listen.

Do those two versions ever argue with each other?

homebody: I like the beautiful juxtaposition of those two worlds of mine. Movement is so tied into ambience as well. Ambient music moves. They can sometimes argue. For example, 'Wambuul' and trying to get it to move a river. That was the sound I was trying to emulate. And it was really difficult because I know what a river moves like, but how can I put a beat to it that's also flowing in that kind of direction? But most of the time I enjoy putting them together if they're opposites.

Ify Obiegbu: I think with your time as a DJ and having to get people to move on the dance floor, do you think being a DJ made you learn how to get people to listen like you got them to dance?

Do you think in doing that, you figured out a way to get them to stand still and appreciate what they were taking in?

homebody: I love dubstep and breaks and bass. That was what I was predominantly doing. And I found just recently that there was quite a fatigue in the crowd. I'd see their attention span really lessen. And it ultimately caused my attention to lessen because I would think, "There's a bit of a disconnect here, and I'm trying to work out where it's coming from," but it's not a bad thing. It ebbs and flows.

That love for more driving sounds have taken a backseat now that I've come to this stage in my life where I actually want to actively listen as well. Around the same time,  I started listening to a lot of music that I listened to as a child and filtered that back to the people I was playing to. Dido, Boards of Canada. Aphex Twins, really disgruntled, broken 90s stuff. And I listened to a lot of soul music like Otis Redding. And so I found drawing from a non-electronic space to put it into an electronic space was really cool.

Ify Obiegbu: What type of elements do you think you take from those types of tracks to put into electronic music?

homebody: I like the feeling of soul and R&B. It's heart wrenching. It makes you feel like you just want to break down in your shower and cry. So I thought, how can I adapt the sensibility of that feeling?

There’s certain tones, classical instruments, that can give that feeling. For example,  a violin or a foghorn (which I used in one of my songs as an Ableton element), but they have a groaning want, a  yearn. I thought, if I can put that in with electronic breaks, that'd be awesome because it's emitting that feeling, but also that rhythm.

Ify Obiegbu: On your 2025 EP 'homebody,' you described itself as an observation of your surroundings. your culture, your ideals of home and all that within a lens of self-autonomy. And now you've made 'prefrontal cortex', which feels less like observing the world around you and more like entering the world underneath it.

Did you know that you were making this shift while it was happening over the course of the year? Was that a conscious decision?

homebody: Any music I make, it comes from what's happening at that time. Whatever's happening in my day-to-day, it's echoing straight into what I'm making. I find them very attached because it's what I know. It felt as though  'homebody' was going outwards and I was internally thinking what does home mean?

For one of the songs, I had watched the movie 'Interstellar', had a breakdown, and pulled out my computer. The feelings I had were so profound that I felt I needed to write about what I was experiencing. Because in the movie, he's trying to go home through this dramatically cosmic lens. So 'homebody' was exploring home primarily culturally where I'm from, alongside other respects. And then 'prefrontal cortex' is flipping it and introspectively looking at myself and looking at that through other people as well.

Ify Obiegbu: Of course, your music is made because of your surroundings and what you're going through at the time  and that direct connection between those two forces.

Do you think the music that you made changed the way that you understood yourself? Or did the music make you understand yourself more?

homebody: It was very life changing in terms of making music. I think because a lot of the poetry or the words that I've written, they were written when I was eighteen or seventeen. And at the time, I was in a domestic violence household and I was homeless. So the poetry that was written was from quite a dark place.

So then, to pull that back out and articulate it as an adult, it felt a relationship with myself as a child and to see that inner child now. In that sense, the music has helped me understand who I was and who I am now in juxtaposition with that younger version of myself. 

Ify Obiegbu: You've built so much of your sound from things that already exist around you. Nature, birds, water, voices, even machinery. And that's what I love about your body of work. You're deciding what gets remembered and what becomes background noise. And you've taken a lot of elements that everyday people would call background noise and put it at the forefront of your projects.

But what do you choose to listen to that other people don't like? What makes your ears perk?

homebody: I think it's the country sensibility coming in. Because I didn't grow up in an urban environment, a lot of the stillness is what I remember. Birds, for example, we all hear them, but especially in a country town, there's no noise pollution. So that is a really predominant sound, especially in the morning. There's also the sounds of water because I grew up right next to the river.

It's whatever brings me peace or whether I find it interesting. I have a synesthesia so sound to me has a lot of texture and colour and I use those sounds to paint a little picture.

Ify Obiegbu: I want to talk about 'Wahluu' . It's still such a fascinating piece of work to me because you're taking this very specific place and letting two very different sounds and two different worlds collide. You've got the racing cars, the noise of Mount Panorama Circuit as a contemporary spectacle, and then those cultural sounds arrive at the end reminding us that this place existed long before the racetrack did.

When you were making 'Wahluu' were you trying to reconcile those worlds or were you interested in leaving the tension between those two worlds intact?

homebody: It was definitely the tension I wanted to keep. That's why it's more a techno driving piece, because I was emanating a lot of frustration that I, and other people I had talked to, had.  Essentially there was a protest around the time  I was coming to terms with my cultural identity.

There was a protest at the top of Wahluu (Mount Panorama) where  they were trying to put a go-karting track on a women's birthing site, and it really hit a spot in my head where I was aware of the sacred land getting taken away. And then the noise pollution of those cars when you live in Bathurst is really aggressive.

So I was trying to articulate people's frustrations as well as cultural frustrations around it being a sacred site. ‘Wahluu’ means to watch over in the Wiradjuri language. So it was a place where people would look out and see smoke signals and look out at their clans but now there's a go-karting track. I wanted to keep that tension. So the driving around, the cars fanging it, and then that kind of overriding the sound of the didgeridoo and the people there. It was very intentional.

Ify Obiegbu: You work, your artistry more broadly, doesn't feel explanatory. It feels very embedded in the way that you're listening and building the music. But I want to know, how do you make work from your culture without also feeling as though you have to translate it for people who aren't from your world?

homebody: I grew up with quite a deconstructed understanding of my culture. So putting pieces back for myself as well for other people. I find sound is the best way to universally explain something because you don't need to translate. It's just there. It's sound. It's at its core what it is. You don't have to make it extravagant. You can make it just really simplified. As long as it feels like something and you can grasp it, that's great.

Ify Obiegbu: In saying that you grew up with a deconstructed sense of your culture and your ethnicity, there's sometimes this expectation with Indigenous art, in whatever form it may be, that it needs to look traditional. For example,  people will look at traditional art and have an expectation for what it needs to look like. But your music and your art form completely disrupts that idea.

What does it mean for you to make something unmistakably contemporary and still have it deeply connected to who you are as a woman?

homebody: I think I've been very lucky. a lot of the up and coming, Indigenous DJ's and musicians and artists, they were already starting to pioneer in those spaces, like DJ PGZ writing his tracks or dameeeela. They were outstanding and doing it well before me. I'd never put the two and two together. I remember playing dameeeela's track, 'The Shake Up' at Groovin the Moo. and I could feel that connection. I could feel the power in that track.

I thought, "Oh my God, if I could make anything somewhat similar to this, I would be blown away."

Ify Obiegbu: A lot of electronic music starts with technology and tries to make it feel human. But you do the opposite. You take something human and then you add these electronic elements over top of it. You take natural things from the world and then synthesize it.

What interests you about that border between organic and synthetic?

homebody: I think it's the juxtaposition. They're so opposite that they work. The process behind making a track for me is that I build the environment first. There's going to be a whole environment that exists within this concept before I've even put a beat down, which I have talked to friends and they're like, "Put the beat down first," but I love my process. It feels intentional and precise. 

Ify Obiegbu: To go back to your latest album, 'prefrontal cortex', you've described it as something designed to resonate rather than overwhelm. That's such an interesting choice when it comes to electronic music because so much of the electronic music culture is built around intensity and excess and volume and escape.

What made you want to create something that asks the listener to come back down rather than take them somewhere else?

homebody: It was a combination of seeing fatigue in myself and in the electronic music space. Just playing so hard and heavy. I was just like, "Oh God, I can't keep up. I'm gonna have a bad knee or something!" so I then really wanted to sit back and make people listen. There's a song called 'Children', I can't remember who the artist is, but they played it at the end of a DJ set to bring everyone back down.

And I  thought "I want to do a whole body of work that essentially does what that track does." I just wanted to feel like I was sitting down and telling someone about my issues, just yarn it out, sort it out together.

Ify Obiegbu: There's a lot of space in the record. I am someone that very much appreciates silence being used as an instrument in itself.

But have you become comfortable with leaving things unfinished or using that silence to create intensity?

homebody: Well with the ballet background, it was all about perfectionism. There's a whole language, a dictionary, on what steps you can use and how they look when used. So once I came into music, it was refreshing to see that everyone was doing anything they wanted. There's no boundary. So I find a lot of freedom in making stuff that's all over the shop and creating that calmness and imperfection.

Purposefully, a lot of my samples are from my voice notes. And I will leave crunchy texture sounds in. The resonance. Keeping that in and not making it perfect. Especially because I self-mastered 'homebody'.

Ify Obiegbu: Learning to own your whole sound. Mastering, producing... What was that like?

homebody: So chaotic. I'd be stuck on a button for a month. I didn't even know how to record a voice. I have a looping station that I record the voice note on and I couldn't figure out how to get a specific plug to the speaker for a month. It was because I was trying to train my ears really well and I thought if I can also master it'll cost a lot less money. And it's so freeing and fun. I just press the buttons all day and experiment with what sounds really cool.

Ify Obiegbu: Still on 'prefrontal cortex'. There’s something interesting about calling a very emotional piece of work 'prefrontal cortex' because the term is so anatomical but the music itself feels incredibly sensory.

Were you interested in that contradiction?

homebody: The reason I called the album 'prefrontal cortex' is because I was in an induction for my youth work job, and we were getting a rundown on how to look after the children in our care. And I found the whole process really clinical. We're talking about people's feelings and it's really clinical. It's a running theme within youth work.

There's so many clinical terms for a lot of kids, and a lot of kids are Indigenous, and before that point they have never had these clinical terms presented to them. And we're translating those terms for them. From that experience, using a term like that felt ironic against the contents of the album. Exactly as you said, I was playing with that contradiction.

Ify Obiegbu: You've spent a lot of time professionally thinking about trauma and about people's lives, children's lives and feelings and emotions through a very therapeutic lens. A psychological lens. At the same time, you're also making art that deals with very similar human experiences.

Did having that clinical language change the way that you think about emotional expression in your music?

homebody: It's as though the emotion was the rebelling. And this same rebellious approach was happening in the non-musical work I was doing. These kids were presented with very clinical ideals centred around cognitive development or CBT or just other psychological terms, and they weren't resonating. They don't understand it through that lens. So it's just rage, emotion, like everything else.

So the album, much like the kids, felt a kind of rebellion to make all the emotions really punch through.

Ify Obiegbu: You've described making music as something that can feel very private, like keeping a diary. And there's this slightly absurd moment where you release your private thoughts and feelings to thousands of people, to the whole world, and suddenly everyone has access to something that used to belong only to you.

What changes once your private creative language becomes a public language? Is there anything that feels different?

homebody: There's more power in it. A lot of social issues thrive in silence. Especially in my experience of working with these kids. They've fallen through the cracks in terms of what's happened in their life, what resources they've lost.

So I find a lot of power in presenting these confronting ideas and just raw emotions because it's real and it's tangible. It's what's happening in the world. I didn't want to create an escapist world because it's not realistic. It wasn't realistic in my art or my work.

Ify Obiegbu: With your work being so personal and also being an offering of stories for other people, do you sometimes want people to misunderstand your work? Or do you want people to know exactly what you mean?

homebody: Either. I think music is so powerful like that. For example, there's so many heartbreak songs that I thought were love songs. I like things being left open for interpretation despite there being an intent and a concept behind it. So it's kind of both. 

Ify Obiegbu: On being a woman and taking up space in these places, did you have to unlearn anything? Did you come in with any preconceived notions of how you should be doing things or what you should be doing?

homebody: 'No' is everyone's favorite word in the DJ-artist booking community. When I started playing, I started playing in a pub in Bathurst. They would not let me play inside because I was a female. It was this unspoken rule. So they put me in the beer garden and I think I played inside once.

Ify Obiegbu: Bathurst name and shame.

homebody: The Oxford Hotel. It's a country pub. I can't expect miracles, but I got 'no' from such an early part of my career, through DJing, and the no has been so consistent that now I'm just kind of like, "fuck it."

Ify Obiegbu: With that, what do you want younger women or girls that are coming up in electronic music to feel entitled to? What should they get to have?

homebody: All the emotions that have been deemed not feminine, like being angry. Being violent. I think be messy, cry, express your emotions. I see it so much with kids and I really believe just do everything and feel everything because it'll change your life like it has with me.

Ify Obiegbu: You've gone from learning Ableton to having your work played on radio stations, performing at festivals, and sharing lineups with artists that you've listened to for years. And now you've released your first album in your career.

When did it stop being something you were trying to build and turn into something that has already been built that you're perfecting and fixing?

homebody: I had a series on Subtle Radio UK. I presented them with an idea that I found really important about championing people doing different things in the music space. I knew a lot of DJs that were very left, very unique, and had a lot of cultural integration into their electronic music. And I noticed within their physical boundaries, they weren't getting booked for things. But I thought they could be the headliner or the all night long DJ.

So conceptually,  I just wanted to showcase them. I just wanted to hear about their life. It was called 'inner;Outer'. An hour set. They could do whatever they wanted. And it was tied into how they felt their personality or their cultural background shone through. I felt I was really pushing artists and giving them space to just go for it. And the works that came out of it made me cry. Beautiful people that really cared about the work they were doing.

To be able to push that forward, that was a moment where I felt as though I was finally doing something.

Ify Obiegbu: You've spent so much of your work teaching yourself how to listen differently, whether that's to Country, to the dance floor, to your own body, to silence. But when someone else hears your music years from now, what do you hope it changes about the way they listen to the world around them?

homebody: I think just existing and feeling. Staying present. I think that's all anyone wants. And just feeling listened to or having a space to listen.

Ify Obiegbu: Final question, if you could work with any person dead or alive and not just a musician, it could be anyone you wanted. A director, an artist, a filmmaker. Who would it be and why?

homebody: The first one is the musician James Blake. He's the reason I produce. I think I was twelve when I started listening to him and the way he creates and then sings and even his features.

The second one is  Christopher Nolan. I recently just did a DJ mix for Ali Bilal. He does really beautiful techno and he's also an Indigenous fella. The whole mix is about the movie tenet because, you know how the film is about  reverses and you don't know what plane of time you're in. I thought, what would this sound like in sound? The way he builds a world, it's a crazy dream.

Ify Obiegbu: That’s a beautiful answer. Thank you so much for coming to sit with us here tonight.

homebody: Thank you so much! 

Words by Ify Obiegbu