"The Niche Within The Universal" Stories 🌏 with Aiwan Obinyan
Eurowaves #33 Interview
Aiwan Obinyan is co-host of Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda and Exec-Producer/Director at AiAi Studios, a multi-disciplinary production company working across podcasts, film, TV, and music. Specializing in sound design and documentary work, she builds projects around community-centered storytelling that refuses to extract - with credits including BAFTA-winning productions.
Photo credit: Ru Parker-Harbord
You can connect with Aiwan on LinkedIn here.
What’s your podcasting origin story?
I adored podcasts long before I knew the term podcasts. I listened to my “podcasts” on good old Apple iTunes. My top shows were very utilitarian, non-fiction shows, including Dan Miller’s 48 Days to the Work You Love (10 points if you can guess what I was working towards) and Desi Serna’s Guitar Music Theory. A few years rolled by and I remember a partner at the time said, “you have to listen to this new show Serial, it’s crazy?!” I pressed play on the series and to say I was blown away would be an understatement. I’d never heard anything like it: a gripping and immersive true crime documentary but for your ears. My curiosity was piqued.
It took a few years for my podcast production journey to begin. In 2019, I cut my teeth on the iconic gal-dem magazine’s flagship show, Growing up with gal-dem: recording, editing, repairing audio, mixing, mastering and learning how to record remotely when the pandemic hit in 2020. It was a steep learning curve but over time I became the producer and then the executive producer. It’s a show I hold close to my heart til this day because of the perfect alignment with my values, creative inclinations and technical interests.
How does your background in film change the way you approach audio intimacy?
My ears are stronger than my eyes. They always have been. My start in the entertainment industry was through music. My goal was to be an MC and a producer, so I studied Music Technology & Production at Leeds College of Music and Leeds Beckett University. I’ve always been an audio first kind of person.
Making documentary films came through my time as a location sound recordist and audio post-production engineer and sound designer. Watching the way stories came to life, morphing and evolving as each member of the production and post-production teams added their own unique stamp and talents to the story, got me thinking about the ways I told stories through music and the many stories yet to be told within my community. So I borrowed a friend’s camera and started shooting my first “short” documentary that turned into a feature.
But the audio engineer never dies. Sound design, music and immersive field recordings have always been something I take seriously and dedicate time to developing. That’s what I’ve carried into podcasting. A show like Rigour & Flow - the podcast I co-host with Dr Tamanda Walker, now in its fourth season - is conversational and intimate, which is one of my favourite formats and one where there’s still loads of room for innovation. There’s also room for subtle, tasteful sound design and actuality that enhances the conversation and brings worlds and words to life.
What’s your number one advice for podcasters looking to go independent and have autonomy over storytelling and their voices?
Practice. When I was learning guitar, someone told me: “First you copy, then you create.” Meaning, study the greats and try to emulate them and understand how they do what they do and why it works. How do they get that specific audio effect? How did they build that specific sound design cue? Why does that particular line of dialogue work so well? Why does the narrative flow so well? You copy enough and it becomes a part of your muscle memory. Then you can start to create, find your voice.
Experiment. Build your own sound, voice, style. It’s important to know who you are and what you want to be and say in this world. That becomes the foundation and driving force, the mission of your career and identity as a creative.
Build it regardless. Don’t wait for someone to give you the money or permission. Just build the thing you want to build with the resources you have. When they - whoever they are - come running, you will be established, strong in your creative voice and identity, and then “they” have to join your party rather than you begging to get into theirs.
Your work with AiAi Studios has always been multicultural and international. How do you think podcasters can use podcasting to connect local stories with a wider international audience without losing the soul of it?
A few years back when working with GAY TIMES on their entertainment offering, the thing that kept coming back to me was the idea of “the niche within the universal.” (I should probably trademark this!)
Working in an industry where you are the minority and where your stories are seen as either “too specific” or “not a priority”, the focus then has to be how can I maintain my authenticity while delivering something that wider audiences can relate to. Real, honest, niche stories and characters that speak to universal human experiences.
So when sourcing or telling stories, I’m always asking: what is universal about this very specific character? What feelings are really common here?
It’s the approach we take across everything at AiAi Studios and at Roots & Rigour, our research arm - whether we’re making a podcast, a documentary series or working with communities to turn their lived experience into creative outputs. The specificity is the strength. A community researcher in South London talking about trust and belonging isn’t a niche story - it’s a human one.
What’s your 2026 podcasting prediction and what’s one thing you hope will change?
I think AI will move from dodgy experiment to par for the course, and with that, it will become a mark of credibility for podcasters to state clearly and upfront when and how AI was used in the making of a show. We’re already seeing that in its early stages with the Netflix documentary series The Investigation of Lucy Letby, where they used AI to recreate contributors with a small on-screen title explaining what they’d done. Transparency will matter.
I have to use the “V” word. Yes, video will dominate, and YouTube will dominate the video podcast space. I think that’s fairly obvious at this point.
What excites me more is the growth in international podcast ad spending as regional networks mature. Local-language educational and lifestyle podcasts are growing faster than English-language business shows in emerging regions like China and Latin America. That’s really exciting for us at AiAi Studios because we’ve always been global in our outlook and international in our identity, style and values.
Share one underrated podcast with us.
The DocFix Documentary Storytelling Podcast by Nigel Levy is a treasure trove. Despite having made documentaries for almost a decade, I’ve learnt so much about the intricacies of documentary filmmaking from this show. Hearing how other filmmakers approach the creative and technical process is food for my brain. No matter your experience level there is something in this show for you.
Thank you, Aiwan!