send + receive v27 is a Nyege Nyege tapes showcase, with a performance of HYPERFEMME GALACTICA by Mahlet Cuff.
A Nyege Nyege formed as a club night in Kampala with the aim to create a space where homegrown, East African DJs, musicians and artists could take risks playing a wide range of sounds in a safe and supportive environment; a place where like-minded people could hang out and enjoy music, share ideas and become friends.
Sisso & Maiko‘s productions epitomize Singeli’s hyperlocal scenius, distilling the vitality and struggle of life of the fringes of the Swahili-speaking world’s most populous city into a unique music which seems to reflect the idea of keeping a cool head in frenetic situations. Between their ratchet rhythms and pitched-up melodies there’s a sublime, unresolved tension at play, where the music feels to accelerate so fast that dancers are gliding, sustaining a breathlessly “up” effect that uncannily recalls mid ’90s UK happy hardcore as much as Chicago footwork, Caribbean Soca, and Shangaan disco, yet with a psychotomimetic appeal all of its own.
Born in the sprawling working class neighborhoods of Tandale and Manzese, Singeli’s signature sound consists of fast paced frantic loops interlocking with each other, with influences from Zanzibar’s Tarab music all the way to South African afro-house coupled with mc’s who often spit satirical lyrics about the challenges facing Tanzania’s youth, from police corruption to the complications of dating girls when you are broke. If there is one studio that stands out amongst the hundreds that dot Dar es Salaam’s musical landscape it is SISSO RECORDS. Centered around producers; Bwax, Sisso, Bampa Pana and Jay Mitta and MC’s Dogo Niga, Kadilida, Anti Vairas and Makavelli, they were early pioneers of the Singeli sound.
A multidisciplinary artist and curator, Violaine Morgan Le Fur (aka Violence Gratuite) has spent the last few years sharpening her creative perspective, developing documentaries, producing exhibitions, and directing music videos and short films. Violaine is based between France and Cameroon. She studied art history and archeology at the Sorbonne, before starting an artistic training at the Villa Arson (Nice) which she continued and finished in La Cambre (Brussels). She directed her first autobiographical documentary « To the West » (original title À l’Ouest) in which she goes in search of the tomb of her father buried in western Cameroon, a film in which she shares her initiation to dialogue with the ancestors. A multidisciplinary artist, she is interested in the art of healing through different mediums, including film and performance. She is currently making a documentary about Pierre Capelle, an old French healer from the Lot Valley who induces trance by putting people in contact with the trees of his garden.
Mahlet Cuff is an emerging DJ and sound artist that uses Black Diasporic genres such as House, electronic, Techno, Dancehall, as a portal to create space for their communities. Konjo places their intentions with blending various genres as a way to create their own worlds, building and rebuilding to transform dancefloors as a site for liberation. Making the dancefloor a space for dreaming and to think beyond what a dancefloor can do, be or look like. As a Black queer femme, and wanting to be able to be in conversation with the Black Queer and Trans audience that they are playing for. They use critical fabulation as a way to fill in the gaps where the erasure of Blackness when it comes to genres such as house, electronic and techno.
The experimental sound and visual performance titled HYPERFEMME GALACTICA uses the medium of DJing to be more than just a dance party but a site to consider the ways that the dancefloor can be transformed into an incubator for dreaming. The performance piece offers a place to think of a utopia and how are we creating our own heaven when it isn’t accessible to us? Through sound and video collaged together, they are offering to reimagine an alternative world where the originators of their craft are honored and recognized. They are not misused, appropriated, and diminished. HYPERFEMME GALACTICA is a performance exploration that is visualizing other worlds, where another world is always possible.
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