9 Must-Hear Albums from Nyege Nyege Tapes, the Label Putting Africa’s Electronic Underground on the Map

From Ugandan wedding songs remade digitally, to polyrhythms hurtling along at 200+ beats per minute
Album covers from Nyege Nyege Tapes

The story of electronic music usually gets told against a limited set of backdrops: Detroit, Chicago, New York, Berlin, London—places where styles like house, techno, and drum’n’bass first took root before spreading outward. These aren’t the only locations of importance, but generally when people talk about dance music, they talk about a select few cities in the U.S. and Europe.

These days, though, the most innovative new electronic sounds aren’t happening in those cities. For one thing, most of them have all gotten too expensive, and their scenes too complacent. The radical shifts are happening much further afield. As proof, look to Kampala, Uganda’s Nyege Nyege Tapes label, which in a few short years has become a hub for head-spinning electronic sounds from across East Africa and beyond. The styles showcased on Nyege Nyege Tapes aren’t the usual shopworn breaks and oonce-oonce grooves. They’re the dizzyingly fast polyrhythms of Tanzanian singeli, hurtling along at well upwards of 200 beats per minute, or the hyper-syncopated cadences and sugary harmonies of electro acholi, Northern Ugandan wedding songs remade on computers.

Credit Bandcamp, in part, with helping this stuff spread around the world. Despite the label’s name, all of its releases are also available digitally, which is good, because as of this writing, every cassette and physical record in Nyege Nyege’s catalog is sold out. Credit, too, the Nyege Nyege Festival, founded in 2015 and run by the same pair of European transplants who started the label, Arlen Dilsizian and Derek Debru. Last year, it suddenly seemed that everyone in the electronic scene was talking about the four-day event, held on the banks of the Nile. Featuring performers from across Africa right alongside like-minded American and European musicians, Nyege Nyege Festival is the rare opportunity for artists from the Northern and Southern Hemispheres to connect. FACT even deemed it “the world’s best electronic music festival,” and just today it was announced that there will be a Nyege Nyege night as part of Red Bull’s New York music festival next month.

Get in the know with nine highlights from Nyege Nyege Tapes’ growing catalog.


Disco Vumbi – Boutiq Electroniq (2017)

Named in homage to a Kampala club night where the Nyege Nyege scene first coalesced, the label’s inaugural release is by Disco Vumbi, aka Kenya’s Alai K, who recorded with locals Martin Juicy Fonkodi and the Nilotica Drum Ensemble during a residency in the Ugandan capital. The four-track EP showcases a hybrid sound that weaves together stomping electronic drums, sampled percussion, and bright, guitar-like melodies based on Kenyan benga.


Otim Alpha – Gulu City Anthems (2017)

A little like Omar Souleyman, who performs Syrian wedding songs over digital keys and programmed drums, the Ugandan singer Otim Alpha and producer Leo Palayeng take the traditional Larakaraka wedding music of the Acholi people of Northern Uganda and South Sudan and remake it with computer software. The results translate the style’s fluid syncopations for a brittle, glassy sound that rattles like a bag of marbles. The synths and electronic drum sounds are bright and overdriven, suggesting busted car stereos and blown-out PAs, while Alpha’s multi-tracked vocals and resonant stringed instruments balance the lo-fi sonics with layers of warmth.


Nihiloxica – Nihiloxica (2017)

Not everything on Nyege Nyege Tapes is strictly electronic. Nihiloxica are a nine-person percussion group performing traditional Bugandan drumming fleshed out with kit drums and synths. Their debut EP has an eerie, almost gothic cast, with digital synths fizzing and rumbling around hypnotic, polyrhythmic grooves. All four tracks were recorded live in Boutiq Studios; to really get a sense of their virtuosity, check out their live videos.


Various – Sounds of Sisso (2017)

Nyege Nyege Tapes’ scope isn’t limited to Uganda. The most brain-scrambling sound the label has yet to surface is singeli, a hyperspeed style native to Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, roughly 1,000 miles to the southeast of Kampala. Cobbled together out of sped-up loops sampled from other regional styles, singeli is pop music in Tanzania. But unlike some of the sleek, radio-ready versions of this phenomenon—“Dab Singeli,” anyone?—the sounds coming out of Sisso Studios are raw and unhinged, with chintzy synth patterns and sampled drum loops sped up so fast, they sound like a cassette deck with the fast-forward button glued down. The further the internet reaches, the harder it becomes to discover something that sounds startlingly new, which makes an encounter with singeli all the more thrilling.


Bamba Pana – Poaa (2018)

Another affiliate of Dar Es Salaam’s Sisso Studios crew turns in an even more unhinged take on the singeli sound, spinning rapid-fire mbira loops, programmed drumming, and tinny keys into a whirlwind blur that makes even the most uptempo strains of European dance music sound anemic by comparison. For a similarly breathtaking example of this highly specific sound, check out Jay Mitta’s Tatizo Pesa.


Slikback – Lasakaneku (2018)

Nyege Nyege Tapes’ Hakuna Kulala sublabel is dedicated to more experimental and futuristic sounds. (I like to think that its mosquito logo is a suggestion of the sounds contained within: rapid-moving, slightly menacing, and distinguished by buzzing frequencies.) Slikback, whose debut Lasakaneku EP launched the offshoot, is one of Nyege Nyege’s greatest success stories so far. The Kenyan electronic musician only began making music a couple of years ago, and he quickly amassed a catalog several hundred tracks deep. He played multiple sets at Nyege Nyege Festival last fall and then a month later played three more sets at Poland’s Unsound; his 2019 calendar includes gigs at CTM, Sónar, and Dekmantel, along with a string of dates across China.

Lasakaneku, which served as Hakuna Kulala’s inaugural release last June, is a fearsome blast of global club styles, with choppy synths and vocal samples sprayed over booming 808 kicks and beats that draw equally from Portuguese batida, UK bass, and Southern trap. He followed it up last month with Tomo, a six-track EP capturing an even darker, more agitated snapshot of his global club sound.


Jako Maron – The Electro Maloya Experiments of Jako Maron (2018)

Heard out of context, this album might not immediately scan as African music. The percussive zaps are reminiscent of the Finnish group Pan Sonic’s icy minimalism; the glowering synth buzz suggests Berlin industrial drone at its most austere. But this isn’t techno. The loping polyrhythms come from the traditional Maloya music of Jako Maron’s native Réunion Island, 587 miles west of Madagascar. In the late 1990s, Maron began working with modular synthesizers and drum machines, refashioning Maloya drumming’s intricate pulses for an all-electronic setup, and the results are as hypnotic as they come, no matter your frame of reference.


Ekuka Morris Sirikiti – Ekuka (2018)

While most Nyege Nyege Tapes releases are determinedly future-focused, the catalog also includes archival projects. This anthology collects the work of Ekuka Morris Sirikiti, a Northern Ugandan griot and master of the lukeme, a small thumb piano with metal tines that’s often known as an mbira. But Eukuka does have one technological twist: All the selections collected here come from an array of home recordings of radio broadcasts, meaning that everything is rinsed in multiple washes of static and tape hiss. The really garbled transmissions, like “Acoc Acoc Twol Iye Akayi,” end up sounding like the East African equivalent of lo-fi tape music.


Duke – Uingizaji Hewa (2019)

If you thought Sisso Studios’ Bamba Pana and Jay Mitta were hardcore, wait ’til you hear Duke, a member of Dar Es Salaam’s Pamoja Records crew. Often overlaid with raspy, sped-up rapping from local MCs like MCZO, Don Tach, and Dogo Liz, Duke’s drums move so fast that they compress entire bars into the space of a single beat. Consider him the Squarepusher of Dar Es Salaam, perhaps: His beats are nimbly hyperkinetic and infused with eerie dissonance. And when he really goes all out, it sounds like punk, basically, just arrived at by different means, but still fundamentally fast, cheap, and thrillingly out of control.