Thirty-one tracks, from Cairo in 1944 to today’s Kampala stages, to understand why technical eras travel better than records
One evening, at some friends’ place, my wife Aya introduces me to the group: “Pascal likes Jean-Michel Jarre.” Polite silence. Around the table, only one person knows the name: our host’s French wife. Aya herself had never heard of him before we met. She did come with me to his concert in Brussels, but she says it herself: she would not put on electronic music of her own accord.
At first I took it as a dinner-party curiosity. Then the question caught up with me: has African electronic music produced, somewhere, an equivalent of the sound that shaped me? I spent an evening and a morning listening, sorting, discarding. What remains is a thirty-one-track playlist. Here is what it tells, and what I did not find in it.
Jarre never played Abidjan
My first hypothesis fitted on one line. Côte d’Ivoire lives in French, watches French channels, sends its students to Paris. Jarre’s music should have travelled there as it did elsewhere. He played at the foot of the Giza pyramids to see in the year 2000, then in the Moroccan desert at Merzouga in 2006. As far as I know, never in West Africa.
A concert is not enough anyway. I remain convinced that a big event sparks discovery, but there has to be a thread to pull afterwards: finding the record the next day at the shop, on the radio, today on the platform in your pocket. Jarre’s 1981 concerts in China mattered because they were filmed, then released as a double album the following year. In Abidjan, there was neither the spark nor the thread.
I also wondered whether I was admitting that my style has nothing universal about it. Nobody would say Mozart has no place in Africa. The issue is not the ear, it is the channel. To place where I am speaking from, France’s lineage from Schaeffer to Jarre sums up the sound whose echo I was looking for.
The pioneers waited for no one
First finding: Africa did not wait for Europe. The first track on the list dates from 1944. In Cairo, Halim El-Dabh records a zar ceremony on a wire recorder, then reworks the sound. That is four years before Pierre Schaeffer’s first noise studies.
In Niger, Mamman Sani comes across an Orla organ in 1974 and talks its owner into selling it. His pieces are used as interludes on radio and television, then released on record in 1978, as Bandcamp Daily’s piece on Mamman Sani recounts. Bodo comes back three times in the playlist, including a version from the 1981-1984 unreleased tapes. That is deliberate: one theme worked over ten years says a lot about the tool.
With the Ethiopian Hailu Mergia and Shemonmuanaye, you can hear local sounds being absorbed: Ethiopian scales move into the keyboards. The Angolan Victor Gama, for his part, builds his own instruments. These artists hold the place that tape and the organ hold in European history. The machine arrives, and each bends it to what is already in their ear.
Pads and the noise of the city
Second stage, the one that moves me most: texture. Hill, by Ibukun Sunday, rests on pads I could slip into a European ambient playlist without anyone raising an eyebrow.
Then Lagos. Emeka Ogboh records the city with binaural microphones: the yellow danfo minibuses, the Ojuelegba bus station, the horns. In his Bandcamp Daily interview on the sounds of Lagos, he sums up his method: the city composes, he documents. Lekki Aiah Freeway joined my favourites on first listen. It is field recording in the sense Schaeffer’s heirs meant it, with a Nigerian expressway in place of a Paris railway station.
The Kenyan KMRU does the same work in Nairobi, more slowly: the tracks from Jar settle into a drone that makes no effort to charm. Jako Maron, on Réunion island, runs maloya through a modular synth, and its ternary rhythm becomes a loop. If I had to play one block to someone who loves Jarre, it would be this one.
From pocket synth to cassette
Third stage, the most joyful. In Nigeria, in the late 1970s, William Onyeabor records Atomic Bomb. There is something Kraftwerk-like and burlesque about him: a toy melody over a serious subject, a voice that does not take itself seriously.
The Ghanaian Ata Kak records Obaa Sima in 1994 in Toronto, on a cassette pressed in a few dozen copies, before a reissue brings it to light twenty years later. It reminds me of Jain: the same nonchalance, the same pleasure in a slightly wonky sample. I mean a family likeness, not a lineage.
Closer to us, the Malian Luka Productions signs Terriya. This is the track where I recognised myself: the construction, the grain, the room left for the voices. It could sound like things I make. Around it, Francis Bebey and his drum machine, then the Egyptian Nadah El Shazly and her processed voice, show that sampling has its African version too.
The Ivorian thread runs through Paris
And Côte d’Ivoire? The thread exists, but it does not start in Abidjan. In 1992, Woya is already mixing keyboards and Ivorian rhythms on Kakou anazé. Ten years later, Douk Saga and the Jet Set launch coupé-décalé from Parisian clubs, with Sagacité. Today, as Pan African Music’s report on electronic music in Abidjan shows, zouglou, coupé-décalé and Ivorian rap still rule the clubs. Ivorian electronic music exists: it is made for dancing, not for listening with your eyes closed.
The most direct link to my own world, I found in Aho Ssan, a Paris-based musician born in 1991 to Ivorian-Ghanaian parents. He composes with digital instruments he designs himself, as he explains in his interview with The Quietus. Simulacrum, then Limen co-signed with KMRU, close the atmospheric part of the list.
That is also where I slipped into my own playlist. On Connected Dreams, Pt. 12, an African voice carries the track. It comes from a sample library, not a recording session: it is a borrowing, and I own it as such. It is not the only track in my discography where this happens.
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What I did not find: an African Oxygène
Once the listening was done, I found an evolution comparable to that of my Electronica playlist: tape, organ, synth, sampling, field recording, drone. Everywhere, the machines set the stages. What differs is who heard what.
I did not find an Oxygène: an electronic listening record, melodic, released in Africa and heard by a whole country. Possible explanations are not lacking. Synths were expensive and scarce. Local labels pressed what sold, which meant what people danced to. And the reissues that let us discover these artists today come from Europe or America, decades later.
One question remains, the one I ask myself as a musician. The ear gets used to what it is served in bulk: what plays on the radio, in the clubs, in the maquis. An audience that has never come across pads or drones does not reject them, it simply does not know them. The exchange can therefore run both ways. I discovered Emeka Ogboh and Luka Productions while looking for an echo of Jarre. Nothing stops a listener in Abidjan from taking the opposite path, provided the track is there where they listen.
The Belgian-Congolese Cedrik Fermont, who compiled Alternate African Reality, warns in CDM’s article on that compilation that listeners should not believe nothing exists outside the countries represented. He is right, and I have to face my own limit: I am comparing records released over there with records that reached me. The absence of an African Oxygène may say as much about my channels as about the scene itself.
Listen to the playlist, and end on stage
The end of the list changes tone, on purpose. Nihiloxica, Ammar 808, Afrorack, Jako Maron and Villaelvin play stage electronics, more rhythmic but in the same vein. Afrorack builds his own modules in Kampala, Villaelvin releases on Hakuna Kulala. This is where the African scene moves most today, and perhaps where the missing spark will be born.
The thirty-one tracks can be played in order on Apple Music, below, or on Spotify.
If this journey spoke to you, the Rê>ON playlist offers another: seventy years of electronic music, from the first tapes to today.
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Do you know an Ivorian artist making electronic music for listening? Write to me, I will add them to the list.
