Josh Idehen Tells Stories from the Outside with LV on “Waiting for the Night”

Josh Idehen, Hyperdub-affiliate LV’s collaborator on their forthcoming album Islands on Keysound Recordings, has migrated back and forth between London and Nigera multiple times in his life. Initially moving to Nigeria from the UK when he was four, he experienced an acute feeling of displacement because all of his cultural references were English or American. When he moved back to the UK, he was again on the “outside looking in,” as he details in the press release for Islands. “Waiting For The Night,” which we’re streaming below, is a meditation on those experiences.

Years of UK clubbing clearly form the tune’s bass-centric, murky foundations, yet the production style doesn’t clearly belong to any one genre or era, much less solely to the present. Rather, “Waiting For The Night” reads as a mélange of UK dance music history splice-edited into itself, a timeless ode to the club as haven. The track’s organization further reflects its narrator’s itinerancy, from section to section without a clear end in sight. Idehen and LV hold us in limbo, between one weekend and the next, plodding along, waiting for the high of drops that we all felt in our knees and our waist.