Musicatlas
Music
- Diaspora Screams - w/ the Modern Hip-Hop Quartet
- Automatic (Hellomachine.com)
- Sexmachines (Hellomachine.com)
- The Uli Suite (Hellomachine.com)
- The Sour Thunder (Hellomachine.com)
Life
Keith Obadike is a composer, conceptual artist and sound designer internationally known for his work online. Many of his works are created with his wife the poet Mendi Obadike. Their work The Sour Thunder was an early Internet opera, which was staged at Yale University and later broadcast on international radio from Berlin. Other works include Sexmachines (for Nam June Paik and James Brown) and Automatic (for Jean-Michel Basquiat and Raymond Saunders). Obadikes work the Uli Suite is a sound art piece based on an abstract Igbo (Nigerian) painting style. Another recent composition by Obadike is a 5.1 surround text-sound work entitled The Pink of Stealth (commissioned by Electronic Arts Intermix and The New York African Film Festival).
Obadike grew up studying classical and popular music and learning midi programming in Nashville, Tennessee studios. Inspired by late 1960s avant-garde jazz and polytonal hip-hop Obadike started his professional career as a hip-hop producer hoping to meld these inspirations. He was a guitarist and sound designer with the experimental band the Modern Hip-Hop Quartet (MCA Records) in New York. Obadike later studied art at the Computing Center for the Arts at North Carolina Central University. While working as an audio engineer at Duke University he became influenced by visiting composers including Paul Lansky and Olly Wilson. He went on to graduate study in sound design and composition for theater at Yale Universitys School of Drama. Obadike became the first African-American or person of color to receive an MFA in Sound Design from Yale University. He was awarded a Connecticut Critics Council Award for Outstanding Sound Design for a multi-channel sound score created at the Yale Repertory Theater in 2004. His work The Sour Thunder is available on Bridge Records. More information about Obadikes work can be found at www.blacknetart.com.