Chino Amobi

Career Diamond Black Hearted Boy (2009–2014) While at art school, Amobi began releasing music under the alias Diamond Black Hearted Boy. His early music was self-released through Myspace. Amobi was quoted in a 2012 New York Times article on seapunk, an early-2010s subculture and microgenre that prized aquatic aesthetics:

As Diamond Black Hearted Boy, Amobi became part of an underground scene of musicians using electronic production techniques to create a subgenre of sound collage dubbed "epic collage". "Nigerian Hair," a Diamond Black Hearted Boy track, appeared on Blasting Voices, a 2012 various-artists compilation featuring E+E (an alias of Elysia Crampton), James Ferraro, and Ryan Trecartin. Amobi told OkayAfrica he realized he had used the name as a "mask," and "I didn't want to hide behind a mask and that I wanted to claim ownership of what I was making, to be able to face someone as me without an alter ego. In the same way that Wangechi Mutu or Richard Serra or Philip Glass create, I want my work to be an extension of me."

That same year, Amobi—along with the musicians Nkisi, from London, and , from Cape Town—co-founded NON Records (also called NON Worldwide). NON is an independent record label dedicated to artists who are African or of the African diaspora, with an artistic and political vision articulated in a manifesto written by Amobi, "NON SUPPORTS ITS CITIZENS OF THE UNITED RESISTANCE". According to Matthew Trammell at The New Yorker, Amobi's EP offered "a more explicit take on air travel" than Eno's Music for Airports, with "buzzy synths swell into prominence like a takeoff, asymmetrical percussion mimics the metallic dance of landing gear unfolding, and talk-box samples evoke the chorus of voices, automated and analog, that echo through terminal halls." Later that year, NON held a performance at the New Museum during Red Bull Music Academy Festival New York. Amobi contributed to two of his friends' albums in 2016: Elysia Crampton Presents: Demon City by Elysia Crampton and $uccessor, the debut album of the Sacramento, California-based producer Fred Warmsley (aka Dedekind Cut).

Paradiso (2017–present) Amobi made his solo vinyl debut with Minor Matter, a soundtrack accompaniment to choreographer Ligia Lewis's piece of the same name. He also announced his debut album, Paradiso, described as "a musical epic set in a distorted Americana populated by a cast of sirens, demons, angels, imps, priests, hierophants, monsters and peasants."

The Wire praised it as "an extraordinary record: utterly grandiose, pulsing and punishing." Comparing the album's soundscape to the works of Hieronymus Bosch and Dante Alighieri, Power wrote "odernity is Hell, Paradiso tells us, but the only way to understand this is to embrace it fully, to stare into the void, to get on all the fairground rides, even though you already feel sick and all the colours are wrong." The Wire named Paradiso the release of the year in its annual critics' poll. Rolling Stone named the album the year's third-best avant-garde release.

Music by Amobi was featured in "Gidi gidi bụ ugwu eze (Unity is strength)", a short film directed by Akinola Davies Jr. for fashion house Kenzo. In 2018, Amobi released a short film accompaniment to Paradiso titled WELCOME TO PARADISO: CITY IN THE SEA. Directed by Rick Farin and rendered in Unreal Engine 4, Amobi listed the film's influences as "The Global South, Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, Timothy Morton's theories regarding hyper-objects and dark ecology after the end of the world, my experiences traveling and touring globally, Square Enix, Xanadu (Citizen Kane), and the poetry of Elysia Crampton."

Selected discography Studio albums Paradiso (2017) Eroica (2024) Eroica II: Christian Nihilism (2025)

Soundtrack albums Minor Matter (2017)

Live albums Live Rehearsal (with Johnny Utterback; 2017)

Mixtapes The Great Game: Freedom from Mental Poisoning (The Purification of the Furies) (with Rabit; 2015)

EPs Anya's Garden (2015) Airport Music for Black Folk (2016) What a Wonderful World (2020) Darling Street (2021) French Extremism (2023) Airport Music for Black Folk: K-Pop (2025)

As Diamond Black Hearted Boy e (2011) Father, Protect Me. (2013) zero (2013) How The West Was Won, Wanted: Dead or Alive (2014)