Eric Okechukwu was standing in a club in Port Harcourt at 2am when the idea arrived. Not as a business plan, but as a frustration. The DJs were exceptional. The sets were unrepeatable. And by the next morning, all of it would be gone. ISS exists because he refused to accept that.
InterSpace Sound System is not trying to compete with mainstream radio. It is not trying to be the next SoundCloud, the next Mixcloud, the next anything. It is an independent, invite-only online radio platform and DJ archive built from Nigeria, with one conviction at its centre: DJs are infrastructure, and their work deserves to be preserved, distributed, and treated with the same seriousness as any recorded music.
Founded in 2022 by Eric Okechukwu, ISS has already weathered the cycle that breaks most independent music platforms. It launched with three DJs, grew to over a hundred, paused to restructure, eliminated its entire roster, and relaunched in late 2025 with a smaller, curated membership and a sharper vision. In early 2026, it launched its online radio arm.
We sat down with Eric to talk about what ISS is building, why it had to start from scratch, and what it means to run a platform that says no more than it says yes.
What is InterSpace Sound System — in your own words, not the press bio?
EO: It is a home for DJ culture. That is the simplest way I can put it. We are an online radio station, a DJ archive, and a distribution platform, but at the core of it, we are building a space where DJs are treated as the cultural infrastructure they actually are. Not as playlist curators. Not as content creators. As the people who move music before anyone else even notices it exists.
Take us back to the beginning. Where did the idea come from?
EO: Port Harcourt. A random night out. I was not planning to start anything. I was just in a club, and the music was exceptional. Not one DJ, but several. The selections, the transitions, the energy in the room, everything was perfectly curated. And I remember standing there at maybe 2am, the music still banging in my ears, and thinking: this is going to disappear by tomorrow morning.
Nobody was recording these sets. The DJs were not recording because it was a live performance, they played it and moved on. The only way to hear any of it again was if someone in the crowd happened to be holding their phone up. And even then, you are getting a phone recording of a club, not the mix.
That was the frustration. All of this extraordinary work, the selection, the skill, the reading of the room, and it just evaporates. There is no archive. There is no way to relive it. The vibe ends when the lights come on. I could not accept that.
So the first move was not to build a platform — it was to talk to DJs?
EO: Yes. I went directly to the DJs. Some of them understood the vision immediately. Some liked the idea but were not sure. Some were not interested at all. I started with about three DJs who said yes, and we hosted our very first session together. That was 2022.
The concept was simple: the DJs record the mixes, we curate them under a themed session, and we give them a permanent home. The DJ gets the full stage. We become the selectors and curators, we set the theme, the visual direction, the editorial context, but the DJ is always the centre of it.
But it did not stay at three DJs for long.
EO: No. We kept pushing, and by a certain point we were flooded with over a hundred DJs who wanted to be part of it. And that sounds like a success story, but it was actually the moment where I realised we were losing control of the vision.
When you have a hundred DJs, you cannot curate. You cannot maintain a standard. Every mix that comes through your platform starts to feel the same because you are saying yes to everyone. And an archive that does not curate is just a hard drive. That is not what we set out to build.
So in late 2023, we took a break. We stopped everything.
That is a bold decision — most platforms would have kept scaling.
EO: Most platforms are not trying to do what we are doing. We are not trying to be the biggest. We are trying to be the one that the culture trusts. And trust requires standards. It requires being willing to say: this mix is not good enough for the archive.
We used that break to restructure. We re-examined the entire vision. We asked ourselves what ISS actually needed to be, not what other platforms were, but what was missing from the landscape entirely. And what was missing was a platform that treated the DJ mix as a serious cultural artifact. Not a podcast. Not background music. A piece of work that deserves editorial context, a catalog number, a permanent home, and proper distribution.
And when you came back, you started from zero?
EO: We eliminated every DJ from the roster and started again. That was late 2025. It was not personal, it was about clarity. We needed to relaunch with a roster that represented exactly what ISS stands for. A small number of DJs, carefully selected, each one bringing something specific to the archive.
We operate as invite-only now. We occasionally accept applications. We approach DJs who we believe belong in the archive, and we invite them personally. That is a deliberate choice. When you see a DJ on ISS, it means something. It means we selected them. That curation is the credibility.
You launched the online radio arm in early 2026. Why radio — why not just stay as an archive?
EO: Because archives are static. They are important, they are the memory, but they do not create a living, breathing relationship with the audience. Radio does. Radio gives people a reason to show up at a specific time on a specific day. It builds habit. It builds community. It builds the kind of loyalty that you cannot get from a catalog page.
And for the DJs, radio gives them something that a recorded mix does not: a live broadcast moment. There is a difference between uploading a mix and broadcasting one. When you are live on ISS Radio, you are performing for the network. That is a different energy. That is what turns a platform into a station.
ISS runs themed sessions — +234 Rave, Spooky Fiesta, Summer Slam, After Hours. How do you decide on a theme?
EO: It always starts with a moment in culture. +234 Rave was about Nigerian identity, the country code is the name. Spooky Fiesta was about that dark, late-year halloween energy. Summer Slam was exactly what it sounds like, peak outdoor, peak energy, the kind of mixes you play at a rooftop.
Every session has a name, a visual identity, an editorial direction, and a release date. We brief the DJs on the theme, and they record their mixes in response to it. Then we curate the session, we set the sequence, we write the editorial, we design the artwork, and we drop it simultaneously on all DSPs under each DJ’s own artist profile.
The session is the campaign. The mixes are the catalog. The editorial is the context. The radio premiere is the event. All of it works together.
You distribute through InterSpace Distribution — your own infrastructure. Why was it important to own that pipe?
EO: Because no other independent radio platform has it. That is the honest answer. NTS does not distribute your mix to Spotify under your name. Worldwide FM does not put your set on Apple Music with a catalog number. We do.
Every mix released through ISS gets a permanent catalog number, ISS 101, ISS 102, ISS 103. That number is yours forever. It goes on your DSP profile, it lives in the archive, and it becomes part of a documented body of work. When you have released five mixes through ISS, you do not just have five recordings. You have five entries in a catalog that the culture can reference.
That is the difference between a platform and an institution. An institution keeps records.
You said earlier that DJs are infrastructure. What does that actually mean?
EO: It means that before Spotify, before Apple Music, before any algorithm, there was a DJ. In Nigeria, in Ghana, in South Africa, in the diasporam, the DJ was the first distribution channel music ever had. They decided what got played. They decided what the crowd heard. They broke records before radio stations noticed them. They moved culture from one city to another through their selections.
Mainstream platforms have completely erased that role. They turned the DJ into a content creator, someone who uploads a mix and hopes the algorithm picks it up. That is disrespectful to what DJs actually do. A DJ reads a room in real time. A DJ makes decisions every thirty seconds about what the next moment should feel like. That is not content creation. That is performance. That is curation at the highest level. And it deserves to be documented — the way John Peel’s BBC sessions were documented, the way Boiler Room documents a room.
ISS is invite-only. That is unusual for a platform in 2026. Are you not worried about limiting your growth?
EO: Growth is not the metric. Trust is the metric. When a listener presses play on any mix in the ISS catalog, they should know, without checking, that it is going to be good. That it has been curated. That it passed a standard. The moment we open the door to everyone, we lose that.
Every institution that the culture actually respects has a standard it holds. It says no. It turns people down. And when it says yes, that yes carries weight. That is what we are building. Not the biggest catalog. The most trusted one.
What does InterSpace Sound System look like in five years?
EO: It looks like the definitive archive of African DJ culture. A catalog deep enough that a researcher, a journalist, a listener, or another DJ can go back and trace how the sound moved, which cities were doing what, which DJs were carrying which scenes, how the transitions happened. It looks like a radio station that the diaspora comes home to every week. And it looks like a name that DJs are proud to have on their discography.
We are not trying to be everything. We are trying to be the one thing that no one else built, the operating system for how African music actually moves. From the DJ, to the radio, to the archive, to the DSPs, to the listener. That is the pipeline. And we own every piece of it.
InterSpace Sound System broadcasts live at radio.interspacemusic.com. Follow ISS on Instagram and YouTube for session announcements and broadcast schedules. The ISS catalog, DJ roster, and session archive are available on the platform and across all major streaming services. Distribution is handled through InterSpace Distribution.
