Manasseh Mashi Is Making Music Without the Usual Rules

There are musicians who need a studio to make music.

Manasseh Mashi seems to need very little.

Give him a voice, a beat, a random sentence from the internet or an ordinary object lying around, and there is a good chance he will find a way to turn it into sound.

That is the creative world of Abuja-based Nigerian musician and producer Manasseh Mashi, professionally known as MonLee Mane.
For more than a decade, Mashi has built a career around an unusually broad relationship with sound. He is a singer-songwriter, music producer, audio engineer, sound designer, beatboxer, session vocalist, voice artist and arranger.
But even that long list doesn’t quite explain what makes his work distinctive.

Perhaps the simplest description comes from Mashi himself:

“I make music out of anything.”

It sounds like a tagline until you look at what he actually does.

His online work has included turning random comments into songs. His music explores acapella and beatboxing. He has worked with the human voice as a musical instrument, created sound designs for digital content and built productions around sounds that most people would probably never consider musical material.

But this way of thinking about sound did not begin on the internet.

It goes back much further.

One of Mashi’s earliest musical memories is from when he was about seven years old. He heard Madonna’s “Frozen” playing on his father’s Peugeot 505 car radio. The song stayed with him, and he would later identify it as one of his early musical influences.

By 2005, while in Jos, he had started making music.

Over the years, the experimentation developed into actual projects. In 2014, he released CubEthics, a rap mixtape. In 2016, he followed it with BINI: The Poeatric Dreamer, a soul EP.

His musical interests, however, were never confined to one genre or one way of making music.

He moved between songwriting, production and performance, eventually becoming particularly known for acapella, beatboxing and vocal production.

Instead of always reaching for an instrument, Mashi learned to ask what could be built with the voice itself.

That exploration eventually became part of the thinking behind Made of Music, his acapella-focused work.

By then, music was only one part of what he was building.

Mashi had also developed the technical side of his craft, working in recording, mixing, mastering, music arrangement, live sound and sound design.

His career expanded beyond songs and albums into advertising, education, animation and digital media. His work with uLesson, for example, has included sound design, dialogue editing, ADR, music production, mixing, mastering, songwriting and vocals.

And there is an interesting detail sitting underneath all of this: Mashi studied Computer Science.

He holds a BSc in Computer Science, giving him a technical background that seems surprisingly compatible with the way he approaches sound.

Music, for him, is not only about performance. There is a technical puzzle to it too: how sounds fit together, how a voice can be manipulated, how an arrangement can be constructed, how an idea can become an actual listening experience.

His history with The Isomers adds another important chapter.

The Abuja indie rock band emerged in 2012, with Mashi involved as a vocalist, songwriter, composer, performer and producer. The group released its self-titled EP in 2015 and Reac+ion in 2018, becoming part of Abuja’s independent music scene.

So by the time people began discovering MonLee Mane through his online experiments, there was already a long musical history behind the name.

The internet simply gave him another place to play.

One of his most distinctive experiments was simple: take a random comment and turn it into music.

Someone could leave a completely ordinary thought under one of his posts, probably expecting nothing more than a few likes or a reply.

Mashi could see something else in it.

A creative prompt.

That idea became Comment Music, Vol. 1, with tracks carrying titles such as “I Miss My Wife,” “Unicorns Are Gangsta,” “Where’s My Ham Sandwich?” and “I Lost My Banana in the Couch Again.”

What could easily have been a one-off internet gimmick became another expression of the same creative instinct that had been present throughout his career.

Don’t wait for the perfect material.

Work with what you have.

His catalogue has continued to grow, from Comment Music, Vol. 1 and the Lofi Laundromat series to Made of Music and more recent releases. Alongside his own music, he continues to work with artists, brands and organisations as a producer, engineer and sound designer.

His professional work has also taken him into international freelance projects. On Fiverr, he has built a substantial client portfolio across acapella singing, songwriting, music production, audio engineering and sound design, while his broader work increasingly touches voice technology and digital audio.

It is a career that is difficult to summarise with one title.

Singer is accurate.

Producer is accurate.

Engineer is accurate.

Sound designer is accurate.

But none of them tells the whole story.

What connects all of it is the way Mashi approaches sound.

He has spent years learning the craft from different sides, performing, writing, producing, engineering and designing.

And somewhere along the way, he developed the freedom to stop asking whether something was traditionally considered music and start asking a more interesting question:

Can I make something with this?

Sometimes the answer is a voice.

Sometimes it is an acapella arrangement.

Sometimes it is a beat.

And sometimes, apparently, it is a random comment someone left on the internet.

That may be the most interesting thing about MonLee Mane.

Not that he can do many things with sound.

But that he keeps finding new things to do with it.