Moving forward in reverse: a conversation with Obuxum

Across four EPs, a video game soundtrack, an album, and the beginnings of a beat tape series, the Jane and Finch producer revels in creative reversal

“It’s even backwards that I’m a producer.”

Over the short span of six years, Muxubo Mohamed, aka Obuxum, has generated an exciting catalogue of genre shattering beat music — four EPs, a videogame soundtrack, an album, and the beginnings of a beat tape series — but the producer reveals it was never the plan.

“Growing up I was like, I wanna become a lawyer. I wanna go into politics; I used to make fun of creative people. I was just really ignorant. I was just like, you’re not gonna go nowhere with art. Who does art? So the fact that years later I end up becoming an artist is super backwards.”

Looking back to her first year out of high school, the Jane and Finch producer says that all changed when a summer camp colleague, recognizing Mohamed’s newfound interest in hip-hop, convinced her to enroll in a city-facilitated hip-hop production program downtown. 

It was a rocky start (“It was also my first year of university, and it happened like twice a week — I was falling asleep”), but she perked up when the course reached sampling.

“[The instructor] took a sample Q-Tip used and he kind of remade the beat. That’s when I started being like, okay, I think I wanna do this. I think I really wanna do this.”

Mohamed’s earliest beatmaking experiments routinely turned sounds wrong ways, and backmasked percussion still wanders into her compositions on the odd production.

“When I first started making beats, I used to love putting things in reverse,” she recalls. “I thought it sounded better.”

Creative reversal has played an essential role in developing Mohamed’s voice as a producer. On her debut EP 2991, titles flip signifiers backwards like code, as if programming listeners to secret rhythms and frequencies. The EP title flips the year Mohamed was born, and the opening track, “Msiudab” is a backward spelling of “Baduism” an allusion to Erykah Badu’s 1997 album Baduizm that simultaneously suggests a more general belonging to the artist’s greater influence than to any one album.

In interviews, Mohamed frequently cites influences as varied as J Dilla, Fela Kuti, and TOKiMONSTA. Flying Lotus directly inspired her to start mixing field recordings and drum patterns together.

“I wanted to know, how does he get these textures?” she says. She specifically reveres the producer’s 2010 album Cosmogramma, which filters the soul and jazz influences of his family (as a songwriter for Motown, his grandmother, Mairlyn McLeod, wrote songs for Marvin Gayye and Diana Ross; his great aunt was Alice Coltrane) through hip-hop instrumentals and Warp abstractions. 

“For me, family’s huge. Seeing that, and thinking about honouring your family through your music, that really touched me. He had a lot of live music on that project, too, which I found really awesome.”

Full of dizzying beats in dialogue with her family’s history and Afrodiasporic rhythms, Mohamed has approached her own beatmaking with a similar respect for what’s come before.

Released in 2015, Luul, the first EP in the producer’s Metaphor series, is named after Mohamed’s mother. The fourth track on that album, “Shaah Iyo Sheeko” (Somalian for “tea and conversation”) is a celebration of matrilineal connection, sampling a welcome party her mother and aunt threw for her grandmother upon her return from an extended trip back home to Somalia. “If you’re gone for a long period of time, when you come back people throw a welcome party for you,” Mohamed explains. Over the course of the track, you can hear party chatter, singing, and some impromptu drumming. “That’s really big in my culture. During weddings and different ceremonies, people will come together — especially women — and sing for you. They’re blessing you, they’re blessing your family, while at the same time they’re drumming and people start dancing.”

Like her project name, Obuxum release titles and tracklistings are typically pounded out all-caps, secret messages disguised as brutalism. But the final entry on Luul is typed lowercase, nothing obscure about it, humble: “for my sweet hooyo macaan, asha luul.” Usually working in frenetic, sub-two-minute bursts, at three minutes and 48 seconds, it’s the longest track on the EP.

A reflection on time spent vacationing in different parts of Haiti, 2016’s Itiyama is rife with Haitian influence, the penultimate “Lakou Bajo” simmering on Haitian drum patterns.

H.E.R., the third and final EP in the series (2018), is an open-eared intersectional feminist statement, the title an acronym for “hearing every rhythm,” resurrecting a name Mohamed once considered for her project before arriving at Obuxum. 

“I can be and make whatever,” Mohamed affirms about the EP. “My music is always gonna be expansive.”

When Obuxum’s first full-length, Re-Birth, arrived in 2019, it made good on that statement, bringing in new voices and telling other people’s stories.

Opening on a woman reporting on gender-based violence in Somalia, the album is immediately situated in socio-political vocabulary. Later, Mohamed incorporates a recording of Viola Davis quoting Harriet Tubman in a Golden Globes acceptance speech, while titles range from sublime images of Black liberation (“Black Girls Flying,” Re-Birth itself) to instructional messaging (“Don’t Blame Them,” “Take up SPACE!!,” “Own Your Truth,” “EQUITY!!!”). Floating faded brass over a heavy clomp, cymbals diffusing like the flat light clank of ceremonial armour, “Own Your Truth” features her Love Conversations beat tape series collaborator Furozh, while “Don’t Blame Them” shares the spotlight with yourhomienaomii, another fellow member of the local beatmaking community.

Meanwhile, soundtrack and sound design work Obuxum provided for Bravery Network Online (2021), a video game by Toronto collective GLOAM, found the producer getting back to her early interest in field recording.

“I would go in the kitchen and play with pots or whatever to get different high frequency sounds. I would use those sounds to create a clap or a snare, sounds that are really high and dragged out, like a laser. I would create a lot of kicks and bangs with a door, essentially. I turned on the shower, recorded that. It would be just random shit that I was recording and I was experimenting with to create new sounds.”

Black cultural revolution backdropped Obuxum’s appearance in the online edition of Mutek earlier this year: the birth of hip-hop and the turntable’s transformation from a device for consuming music to an instrument, graffiti, Black Panthers, riots and lootings — going backwards to move forward.

In and outside her work as Obuxum, Mohamed frequently returns to resource sharing as a tool to bridge socioeconomic gaps, conditions felt in the very gear she creates with.

Live and offstage, most of Obuxum’s music is built in the box with Ableton, though she’s also known to bring a microKORG onstage, which features heavily on Re-Birth. Mohamed has designs of introducing a Teenage Engineering OP-1 synthesizer to her arsenal, but she says the cost of hardware is generally prohibitive. 

“I just need like two, three things. I just think about it in terms of incorporating it with my live set, so that’s why I really want it. It’s mostly for that. You can emulate any sounds in box.”

Though she’s no longer associated, in 2018, she co-founded the Off the Scene collective with collaborators across the border to facilitate exchange between the beat scenes in Toronto and New York, while locally she started a program through the Salvation Army, showing autistic youth the ins and outs of beatmaking. 

Mohamed had a similar goal when visiting Haiti prior to Itiyama. Through Rap Kreyòl, the country has a rich history of hip-hop reaching back to the ’80s, but Mohamed’s efforts were met with resistance from village elders wary of the secular form.

“I wanted to teach the kids how to make beats, but the head of the village was like, ‘hip-hop is banned here.’ So I remember it was really hot one day, I was just sitting down playing beats off my phone, and this one kid came up to me and started rapping in Creole. And then all of a sudden you see a bunch of kids surrounding me, all rapping and stuff. It was so dope. But this elder gave me a warning. He was like, if you do that again I’m gonna kick you out. I was like, okay, whatever.”

When the pandemic hit, Mohamed put music on pause and doubled back to social work, redirecting her energy to providing support in shelters and supportive housing.

“I kind of took a step back just because I was working a lot and responding to the needs of the community,” Mohamed says. “It’s only now that I’m starting to make music again.”

Enrolled in Music Publishers Canada’s Women in the Studio National Accelerator, a career development program that each year connects a new cohort of artists to a series of resources, including workshops, educational sessions, and opportunities to network with industry leaders. Mohamed hopes to use the opportunity to work out details around her next album.

“I’m just learning a lot about business, trying to figure out ways to get funding for my music. For my next album I’ll have music videos, stuff like that. It’s one thing having the music, it’s another having visuals,” Mohamed says. “I have a concept for the album already, but for these videos I feel like I’ll be telling different stories. Things that I’ve experienced. There’s lots of talk about transition on the next piece of work.”

Re-Birth is out now via URBNET.

JANUARY 24, 2022 UPDATE: This blog was originally published ahead of Obuxum’s Sept. 25, 2021 performance in the parking lot across the street from the Garrison as part of Long Winter’s Together Apart programming. As we ride out Omicron on this end of our 10th season’s programming, we’re jamming live highlights from those shows into fresh episodes of Long Winter TV. For footage from Obuxum’s set, tune into our YouTube channel on Thursday, January 27 at 7pm EST.