Engineer Wuod Fibi Biography, Barikiwa Studio Founder

Engineer Wuod Fibi alias Baba Yao is a popular Luo musician and the founder of Barikiwa Studios.

Barikiwa Studios is the machinery behind many Ohanglas songs crooned by popular artists such as Prince Indah among others.

Over the past seven years, the studio has gained a reputation for producing hit after hit and has produced some of the biggest names in Luo music.

In this article, WoK brings you the journey of how Barikiwa Studios grew from a single room in Kariobangi to a national brand.

Around 2012, Wuod Fibi, then a budding musician, wanted to record a song. Frustrated by the inability of studios to meet his creative expectations, he took matters into his own hands.

Instead of revealing his musical aspirations, he decided to join a studio as a handyman, all the while harboring the dream of learning the art of music production.

His intention was to learn how to record music so he could record his song for himself and hopefully give it the touch he was lacking from producers.

He worked for four months, being paid sh 400 per day. By the end of the four months, he had learned everything he needed to know about music production.

Interestingly, during this period, Wuod Fibi was also an active gospel minister.

In fact, as he revealed during Obinna’s Kula Kula show, he once traveled to India to preach the gospel, going by the name Apostle John Eric.

One day, he prayed for a congregant, who coincidentally, bought a house and a car in two months.

In her gratitude to the ‘anointed man of God’, she gifted him a one-bedroom house in one of Nairobi’s posh suburbs. The house came with six months of rent fully paid.

She also gifted him a laptop. That laptop became the Genesis of Barikiwa Studios.

“After I got the laptop, I bought an Ampex woofer for sh 2500. I also bought a MIDI controller and a Behringer. That was the equipment I used to start the studio,” the father of three recounted in later interviews.

At first, the studio went by the name ‘Substance Records’.