LA-based OBEN has created a series of extraordinarily sculptural sound pieces

Fake fur, mock stone, wood and metal come together in OBEN’s extraordinary menagerie of custom speaker designs. The company’s debut collection, Echoes of Earth, was first shown at Miami Art Week 2025.

We spoke to the founders of the LA-based artists Stevie and Bronx, about the unique ethos and approach that OBEN uses to shape sound for space.

W*: When you set up the company, did you see it as an extension of your existing artistic practice, or a new space in which to operate and perhaps find new ways of working?

Stevie and Bronx: OBEN did not feel like starting a company so much as recognizing something that had already been forming between us for years. We are husband and wife, and have also been creative collaborators for over a decade, with practices that were independently orbiting many of the same questions OBEN collectively explores.

Stevie’s work has long explored how design, movement, narrative, and environments shape emotion and perception. Bronx is a recording artist, songwriter, producer, and film composer signed to Roc Nation, with years spent understanding sound from its source: how songs are built, how frequencies interact, and how emotion is created through timing, texture, and space.

In many ways, we had already been moving toward this for years. In May of 2020, during the first few months of the pandemic, we were stuck inside and built a sculptural piano in our kitchen for ourselves. It started as an experiment to give sound a physical presence. We were less interested in the instrument as equipment and more interested in how an object could shape the feeling of listening.

W*: How did the first speakers come about?

S and B: We had already spent years exploring how environments shape emotion and how sound can completely change the feeling of being somewhere. OBEN became the first place where all of those interests could exist at once, first inside a singular object and now increasingly across the immersive environments we are developing.

The first works were originally made for our own home because we could not find anything that reflected the relationship we wanted between sound, art, and space. We appreciate technology, but we reject the idea that technological sophistication should require aesthetic compromise.

There is something strange to us about the fact that some of the most emotionally powerful experiences in our homes are often delivered through objects designed with no real emotional consideration. That led us to a different question: what if the object responsible for one of the most emotional experiences in a room was also one of the most beautiful?

W*: How are the speakers made?

S and B: Every work is built entirely by hand and serialized individually. That relationship to making is important to us. Bronx grew up alongside his dad, who is an incredibly skilled contractor and craftsman, and developed an early understanding that physical decisions matter, that materials carry feeling, and that the way something is made changes the way it is experienced. Stevie’s work has always explored how objects, environments, and experiences shape emotion and perception.

These are not sculptures with speakers added later, and they are not traditional audio products dressed up as art. Form, material, and sound develop together until they become truly inseparable.

Wallpaper*: How are the various speaker characters established and created?

Stevie and Bronx: Every OBEN work begins from the same pursuit: creating sound that feels startlingly alive. Korus begins with the wood itself. The grain is read before a single cut is made. Chambers are carved to follow the logic of the material rather than a predetermined design.

The result feels engineered and inevitable at the same time. Because the enclosure is solid hardwood, the body of the work resonates differently than a composite or textile form. There is a warmth and density to the low end that reads as grounded, almost architectural.

The Arqos model is built from hand-sculpted mineral composite. The arch and portal forms it draws from are not decorative references. They are geometries that human beings have returned to across every culture because of what they do physically when you stand before them. That threshold quality is present in how Arqos behaves in a room. It has a sense of weight and gravity that the wood works don't.

Callisto is built around concealment. Its cratered surface reads as monumental from across a room and handmade from close. The domed geometry creates a different projection pattern, and the choice between hardwood and mineral composite versions produces meaningfully different tonal characters from the same form.

Mane is the most tactile. Acoustic textiles wrapped around the enclosure don't just change the surface. Fiber and density affect how the form absorbs and releases sound at the boundary. The gemstone legs aren't ornamental either. Mass and contact with the floor change resonance behaviour.

Finally there’s the Jovian, which breaks the premise of the question entirely. Every other work is a pair. Jovian refuses the conventional stereo premise from the start. No pairs. No left and right. A single tower, eight drivers projecting outward in all directions. You're no longer positioned in front of the sound. You're inside it.

W*: Does each model share technical underpinnings, or are there performance and specification differences between the various models?

Stevie and Bronx: Across the collections, there is a shared technical philosophy and level of fidelity, but the goal is simple: we want listening to feel less like hearing a recording and more like feeling a real performance unfold in front of you. All of the works share the same underlying acoustic philosophy.

Every model is built around a single full-range driver architecture because we are committed to preserving the integrity of a performance and allowing sound to arrive as one event. Many high-fidelity systems divide music across separate components dedicated to lows, mids, and highs in pursuit of extracting maximum performance from each range. We intentionally do not.

The forms are not decorative shells around a speaker. Material selection, internal architecture, proportion, surface, scale, and structure all influence both how sound behaves and how the object is experienced physically in a room. The characters emerge through a sculptural process rather than a traditional product design process. We think of our limited editions less as product variations and more as distinct instruments within the same body of work.

The honest answer to whether these works share technical underpinnings: yes. The same standard of fidelity runs through everything we make. But each work has its own acoustic character, arrived at through its own material logic. Some anchor a room. Some inhabit it. One dissolves it entirely.

Wallpaper*: Have there been any particularly interesting responses from gallerists or spatial designers and architects about the Oben range?

S and B: One of the most consistent initial responses has actually been a moment of disorientation. At first glance, some people assume the works are sculptures. Others think they are furniture, architecture, or conceptual objects. There is often a moment where people are observing the form and trying to intellectually place it. Then the sound starts.

Once people hear them, they realize the forms are not containers for sound. They are part of how the sound comes alive. That realization is often where architects and spatial designers become especially interested, because the conversation shifts beyond the individual object and toward what happens when sound itself becomes part of the architecture.

Gallery and institutional settings open an entirely different dimension of the work for us because they allow the exploration to expand beyond the individual object and into the room itself.

We had an early opportunity to test that idea publicly through our first immersive installation, Echoes of Earth, presented during Art Basel Miami with support from The Macallan and Bentley Motors. Watching people move through the environment confirmed something we had already suspected: once sound becomes spatial, people stop behaving like observers and start behaving like participants.

Wallpaper*: Dare I say it, but there's a very alien/science fiction element to some of these speaker forms, an approach that feels almost organic. How did you determine these distinct characters and personalities?

S and B: We actually love that observation because there is definitely an otherworldly quality to most of our work. Ironically, we never sit down and intentionally decide to make something feel alien or futuristic. There is usually a moment at the end where we look at each other and think, ‘Why does this feel so much older than us? Why does this feel familiar?’

We are really interested in the subconscious, dreams, altered perception, mythology, memory, and objects that feel discovered rather than designed. Some feel protective. Some feel ceremonial. Some feel irreverent. Some feel playful. If we had to place the work somewhere, surrealism is probably the closest reference point. We think of our objects less as inventions and more as discoveries, and believe intuition is one of the highest forms of pattern recognition.

That also shows up in how we select materials. The organic quality people sense in the work is real, it comes from paying attention to what materials already want to become rather than forcing geometry onto them. Surfaces that erode, fibres that hold tension, woods that reveal age, forms that feel more grown than assembled. We rarely make that decision consciously.

We just follow what the material is already doing. There is something about encountering an object and not immediately knowing whether it was grown, remembered, discovered, or made. That is what we are reaching for.

Wallpaper*: Do you have an philosophy of sound and sound reproduction?

S and B: Most audio is engineered around the idea that music is a collection of frequencies to be reproduced as accurately as possible. We don't see it that way. Nobody knows more about music than the people who make music - Bronx has spent nearly two decades making music professionally as a recording artist, songwriter, producer, and film composer. That background shapes everything.

Our starting question was never simply how you reproduce sound, but how you preserve the feeling of a performance. There is a difference between understanding sound as information and understanding music as something authored. To us, songs are constructed experiences. Tiny decisions around timing, space, layering, tension, release, distortion, silence, and texture completely change how something feels emotionally.

When sound is divided across multiple drivers and reconstructed by a crossover, those relationships shift in ways the ear and brain feel even when the mind doesn't register why. Some of the intimacy of the performance disappears. That perspective shapes every decision we make.

Every OBEN work is built around a single full-range driver architecture. No crossover. Sound arrives as one event rather than a collection of separated frequencies reassembled on the other side. That is the foundation. The forms are not decorative and the acoustics are not an engineering problem to be solved later. Material, proportion, geometry, resonance, and structure all shape how sound ultimately arrives in the body.

Most musical instruments are not rectangular for a reason. We think about that a lot. People often assume the sculptural forms exist despite the sound. What surprises them is realizing the forms themselves are part of why the experience feels so alive.

OBEN Mane, from $26,000 / Callisto, from $78,000 / Arqos, from $71,000 / Korus, from $71,000 / Jovian: starting at $125,000, OBENhifi.com, @OBENhifi