For Omayela, the studio isn’t a private space anymore. It’s a live feed. People are watching. The song is being built in real time, and there’s no pause button if something doesn’t land.
“This creative environment is very special, it awakes a feeling of performance since we are observed by an audience as we create a song. The adrenaline and desire to impress is multiplied by this feeling of performance and it results in a great product that we are always proud of.”
That pressure changes things. You can hear it in the way ideas arrive quickly and stick, or don’t. There’s no overthinking in the moment, no disappearing for an hour to tweak a line. If something works, it’s because it worked right then.
“The feeling of spontaneity is crucial to the experience of the Wav Garden and I personally think that that is how the best songs are created. The polishing is my job afterwards and I just try to make it sound as clean as possible all whilst keeping that feeling of authenticity and spontaneity.”
The clean-up happens later, but the core stays intact. You get songs that feel slightly unguarded, like they haven’t been sanded down into something safer. There’s a bit of risk in that, but that’s also where the energy comes from.
The people in the room matter just as much as the setup. None of it is random. No casting call, no label matchmaking.
“I actually personally handpick the artist I want to work with the most and these are almost all people I’ve met before and wanted to create with in the past. I just use the stream as an excuse to make it happen. The artists shape the vibe of each sessions with there personal colours and aura they bring and it always turns out to be very cohesive with my vision of the project.”
You can feel that familiarity across the mixtape. Even when the voices change, it never sounds like a forced collaboration. More like a continuation of conversations that were already happening, just now with a mic on.
The language shifts work the same way. English, French, Spanish, sometimes within the same stretch of a track, sometimes from one verse to the next. It doesn’t feel like a concept so much as a reflection of who’s there.
“Honestly, the multicultural aspect is very natural in Montreal, I did not consciously plan for the blend of language to happen, it really came up naturally through the variety of cultural backgrounds from the guests. Very proud of that though!”
There’s no announcement when it happens. No moment where the track pauses to point it out. It just moves.
At the centre of the mixtape is Turn Me Back, which pulls things into something more personal without changing the way it was made.
“This song is actually very personal since I’m talking about my struggle with welcoming romantic love in my life again.”
It starts the same way as everything else here, with a freestyle, no overthinking, no second pass to soften the edges.
“This particular song was created out of one freestyle and the theme was already ingrained in the topline before I wrote the lyrics. Kola & Frase created the instrumental in about 20 minutes, and then they let me go off, you can actually see in the clips that at some point during the freestyle I try to pass the mic to them but they refuse and it prompted me to go on and freestyle the whole idea, which probably gave me the confidence that transpires in the final product.”
That moment, trying to hand off the mic and being forced to keep going, says a lot about how this project works. You don’t get to step back and reset. You either follow the idea through or you lose it.
And when it does come together, it carries that feeling with it. Not polished out of existence, not rewritten into something more controlled. Just left close to where it started, with enough work done afterwards to make sure it holds up outside the room.
Listen below:
Share this :
