Adeolu

With The In Between, Berlin-based drummer, composer, and sonic architect Lukas Adeolu Akintaya, releasing under the name Adeolu, offers a disarming, slow burning invocation. The record is a tender articulation of compositional care, a process-based unfolding of sound shaped by reverence for improvisation, ancestral inquiry, and the indescribable, divisible-invisible. This is a meditation on universal timelessness. Released on Power House Records, a young and independent label based in Cologne run by Hermes Villena, The In Between is a work of patient experimentation, suspended, evocative and precise.

Rather than mapping a single geography or aesthetic, The In Between traverses multiple sonic climates. Urban frictions, ancestral echoes, deep breaths and tectonic silences. This is not groove driven music, nor is it tethered to fixed grids or linear progression. Instead, the album orbits a liberatory conversation between free jazz and noise, engaging them not as static genres but as listening practices, frequential vibration states, and poetic technologies.

Emerging from sketches and compositional cells developed between late 2022 and spring 2025, the record grew slowly and deliberately. These initial fragments were allowed to breathe and drift toward improvisational form before being de-composed and reimagined in post production. For Akintaya, each musical cell became a living organism with an afterlife, transmuting and mutating beyond its original form in unimaginable ways.

Akintaya’s process is deeply relational. He collaborates not only with a cast of artists in his community, but with past and future selves. He works with a community of longtime collaborators and improvisational partners, inviting them into a suspended space of present sonic inquiry. There are no prescriptions here, only questions. A wide open listening posture permeates the record, cultivating a space where musical language is emergent rather than imposed.

The result is a record that moves slowly and intentionally through a spectrum of moods and resonances. It traverses temperatures and temperaments. It leans into the discomfort of not knowing and emerges with something tender and raw.

In its rhythmic and emotional architecture, The In Between evokes a relationship with time that is flexible, emotive, and felt. Time signatures are stretched, bent, or dissolved. Patterns mutate into new organisms. Repetition is reconfigured through a lens of ecosystem thinking. The emotional tempo of each piece is governed not by metric precision but by a kind of intuitive biology.

This is music that questions belonging, identity, and our species' place in a time of ongoing terror and planetary transition. Akintaya allows. His mastery is not concerned with exceptionalism or perfection; rather, his mastery is a commitment to the unknown.

This work allows ancestral traces and speculative possibilities to coexist in the same compositional breath. Grief, patience, becoming, and home are not fixed themes but omnipresent undercurrents. Felt more than overtly stated.

Text by Gugulethu Duma

Pre- order the album HERE

Credits

all music written by Lukas Akintaya (Adeolu)

produced by Lukas Akintaya & Petter Eldh

Saxophone, guitar, bass, and drums were engineered by Nanni Johannson and Frieda Johannson at Hansa Studios, Berlin.

Additional vocals, drums, percussion, guitars, and synths were recorded by Akintaya at his studio and at Out of Time Embassy, Berlin. Eldh recorded additional moog synth and rhodes parts at his studio. The album was edited by Eldh and Akintaya, mastered by Martin Ruch, and the vinyl was cut by Erik Breuer at Brewery Studios.

Visual identity was led by Odelia Toder (art direction and design) and Parissa Charghi (typography).

for inquiries contact lukas.akintaya@gmail.com