NEO MUYANGA

Magic is…

Technology is, in my view, an aid to enhance the feeling of wonder within us who inhabit a world that is increasingly mysterious, cynical-making, frightening, and where we are rendered ever more suspicious of one another’s intentions and motivations. Human presumptions of holding near-hegemonic dominance over life on this planet (arguably often centred in the global north) are progressively being called into question by contemporary climate science as well as our recent collisions with the epidemiological moment of reckoning that is Covid-19.

The ever-encroaching technolomagic of our day (I count the Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence and Brain-Machine Interfaces (BMIs) among its manifestations) is, I would argue, an expression of our little-explored human longing for magical powers – powers enchanting enough to transform us into 21^st-century superheroes able to remodel our personal context(s) into an anthropoverse-at-large,^{[1]An Anthropoverse, presumably, would be what appears to be on the cards as a follow-on expansion from the Anthropocene, as modelled by tech corporations and nouveau-colonial adventurers planning to take willing humans hurtling through the solar system and beyond.} our own version(s) of Atlantis.^{[2]Atlantis was an idyllic utopia, described by Plato in his Timaeus and Critias. See N.S. Gill.}

Whether or not this investment in technolocasting ourselves will lead us to greater good or bad is not the concern of the present reflection. Rather, what I aim to put forward is a brief and personal, if historical, survey of “electron music”^{[3]In coining the idea of “electron music”, I’m drawing on composer Herbert Brün’s idea that electronic music and electrons are somehow interlinked. See Tara Rodgers, Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 7.} of the late 20^th century that has struck me as expressive of technolomagic from a Pan African standpoint – expressions of musical tech-ability that have been ignored for far too long. I also intend to pointedly and specifically link the concepts of Pan Africa and diaspora, as I believe this is important if we are to appreciate the role that allegiance(s) to Africa — both as a space and a place of cultural and political belonging — portends.

To facilitate the agenda outlined above, I will insist from the outset on an expansive reading of the term “Pan African” as an entity that has long fostered forms of cross-pollination and collaboration, continually informing the socio-political symbioses of action and affect that have defined the relational dialectics between “Africa” and its “diaspora”. It therefore also bears stating that I do not ascribe this expansive perspective on the African diaspora, with its logics of border-crossing, ambiguity, multiplicity and fluidity, to something that has only recently been facilitated by new forms of tech networking such as social media, the internet, late 20^th-century globalization or new jet plane travel routes. Rather, I endeavour to take seriously the long-standing exchanges between Africa and its grand diaspora, beginning at least from the time of the Olmecs of Mexico,^{[4]Runoko Rashidi, “Ivan Van Sertima and the Olmec World: A Photo Essay”, Africology: The Journal of Pan African Studies, 9:4 (2016), 364-372,.} right across the eras of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, crossing over to the United States’ civil rights movement and “exiled” South Africa’s anti-apartheid solidarity movement. Musical figures who, for me, typify such vital relationalities and exchanges between Africa and its expansive diaspora include Charlotte Maxeke (1871-1939) and Miriam Makeba (1932-2008).

Africa in the World

As liberation movements began progressively articulating the project of continental Africa as a region politically autonomous from Euro-American colonialism, influences and aesthetics in music-making techniques, as well as the dissemination thereof, remained interlinked between African music producers and music machinery makers and taste markets in the west.^{[5]Arguably, this process includes the declarations of independence of Egypt, Eritrea, Libya, Sudan, Tunisia and Morocco all before the much-quoted example of Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana in 1957.} This was partly due to the fact that western recording companies had already established colonial outpost record labels in Africa.

Some of these institutions had been founded as early as the beginning of the 1920s in the case of Nigeria’s Zonophone, while others such as HMV began operating out of Ghana slightly later.^{[6]See the liner notes by Mark Ainley and Savannaphone, Various Artists, Living is Hard: West African Music in Britain, 1927-1929 (album) (London: Honest Jon’s, 2008).} To press vinyl, artists like the Reverend J.J. Ransome-Kuti (grandfather to Afrobeat progenitor, Fela) “travelled from Nigeria to Britain to record Christian hymns in Yoruba” while others like Ladipo Solanke “recorded for Odeon in Germany”.^[7]Ibid. These recordings were ultimately brought home to Nigeria and sold widely, while other copies remained for the taking by an established base of collectors in Britain and Germany.

Though these confluences between African music and the process of mechanical reproduction have long persisted, they are not often included in the story of electronic music in Africa. This likely has to do with the mythos surrounding electronic music as a cultural innovation. In her book Pink Noises, Tara Rodgers informs us that the composer Herbert Brün described the negative way in which his audience initially perceived electronic music thus:

Electronic music is made of electrons. Electrons split atoms and a split atom is in some way part of the atom bomb, and one doesn’t fool with such things. Above all it shows complete lack of taste and tact, to want to make music with weapons of death.^{[8]Quoted in Rodgers, Pink Noises,7.}

Following closely (and unfortunately) on the themes of death and global mayhem, Africa’s presence on the electronic music scene has long been associated with the work of Egyptian experimental composer Halim El-Dabh, who premièred his electronic pieces as the Second World War was drawing to a close. In An Alternative Genealogy of Musique Concrète, Fari Bradley writes:

Expressions of Zar (Ta’abir al-Zaar) by Halim El-Dabh premiered in an art gallery in Cairo 1944; among the first known work ever composed by electronic means, and also the first intended for an electronic presentation.^{[9]Fari Bradley, “Halim El-Dabh – An Alternative Genealogy of Musique Concrète”, Ibraaz (2015).}

Bradley suggests El-Dabh may actually have pipped Pierre Schaeffer – widely venerated as the originator of musique concrète – to the post to issue a work under the auspices of the new genre, since Schaeffer and his collaborators only started showcasing their own original works in 1948. 

El-Dabh had been experimenting with a portable magnetic wire recorder, using it to make field recordings of the sounds of his social context. For him to make a recording of a Zar ceremony would have taken quite some doing, as these ceremonies tend to be highly discrete (at times even secret) and open only to the inner circle of followers of the traditional healing and exorcism practices of Zar, which many believe originate in ancient Nubia.

Bradley makes the point that one reason why Schaeffer, rather than El-Dabh, became known as the originator of musique concrète rests on the fact that:

Schaeffer created the theoretical basis for it. Furthermore, Schaeffer’s composed shellac recordings were created in an artistically academic environment, which supported the results of his findings, while El-Dabh developed relatively autonomously in Egypt, where he was born and raised.^[10]Ibid.,3

What Bradley points to is the very rub of how difficult it is to track the movements of electronic music – or Afrotechnolomagic, as I have termed it here – over the Pan African soundscape prior to the era of pervasive filesharing over the internet and its concomitant personal tags and profiling.

Collection in Selection

To track this history of tech-enabled musicking across the African diaspora, I have chosen to follow the trail left by the tools-of-the-trade most often adopted by music-makers who identify with the notion of African diaspora, as this helps us enrich our understanding and appreciation of the place of technology in African sonic future(s).

The tools one collects give slant and colour to what a collector is likely to produce, and also transmit an etheric affect and valency that represent the mythos of the collector’s chosen universe as materialised in the performance of a series of “power” actions while in possession of those very tools. As David Martin reminds us concerning the character of the book collector:

The collector’s relationship to books is one that does not emphasize the functional or utilitarian value of the individual volumes, but rather prioritizes their talismanic qualities. Like a modern-day oracle, the book collector is possessed of an ability to see dreamily right through the covers of their books into the distant past, and bring that past back forward into the world of the collector.^{[11]David L. Martin, Curious Visions of Modernity : Enchantment, Magic and the Sacred (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 211-212.}

I argue that similar principles are at play when a “musicker” (one who engages in musicking) chooses tools-of-the-trade based on what they desire to animate musically, while importing a sound from either a distant place, a past, or a future, to come crashing into a present moment.^{[12]Due to my initial commitment to live performance on acoustic instruments, being attracted especially to their “pure” and “authentic” character and gravitas, I had to confront extensively my assumptions about the meaning of making music and my own conceptualisation of what music could be.}

Wheels of Steel

Around twenty years ago, I was a member of the then Los Angeles-based acoustic guitar duo Blk Sonshine. I attended a gig by a DJ who was, at the time (and rather embarrassing in retrospect) entirely unknown to me. As he played his set, I found myself totally enchanted by the sound coming out of his twin turntables. The DJ I am referring to is none other than the mystifyingly adept Cut Chemist, who at the time was spinning break-beat – what today would be termed “old-school” ’90s Hip Hop. It was electrifying! As I didn’t recognise any of the music he was sampling, I decided to approach his podium in an attempt to identify some of the covers in his vinyl collection. Said covers were resting in crates on the floor (for quick reach), making them quite easy to identify from up close. What I saw only confounded me further: there, in DJ Cut Chemist’s crates, sat what looked like old Disney movie soundtracks, mixed with Country and Western crooners adorned with Stetson hats, blue denims and pointy cowboy boots. So, what was actually going on here?

I recall this incident now as marking the day I realised what many friends who’d grown up as self-professed Hip Hop-heads (like Masauko Chipembere, my co-founder in Blk Sonshine) had over time tried to teach me: that turntables, when handled deftly, turn into veritable instruments. The reason, as I’d so plainly witnessed with Cut Chemist, was that certain DJs could very well make new, original and live music using the grooves of any source material whatsoever. I felt rather like a newly-minted Johnny-jus’-come to a corner of Eddie Murphy’s America^{[13]Whilst growing up in Soweto, we loved to watch comedian Eddie Murphy’s 1988 hit movie, Coming to America. In the movie, an African prince, together with his aide, travel to the United States to broaden his horizons prior to taking up rulership of his African kingdom.} as I made the enchanting discovery about the sounds that could be coaxed out of ordinary-seeming turntables. The skills put on display by Cut Chemist left me questioning whether I’d even begun to comprehend the (musical) worlds I was encountering in America. To say that I was humbled as a musician would be an understatement.

I was amazed to learn how turntables needed to be calibrated and handled manually in order to yield the nuanced responsiveness — the improvisatory and organic sound — they did in the hands of Cut Chemist. His whimsical scratches came off seemingly con sprezzatura.^{[14]An affectation of casualness put on to disguise great skill as nonchalance during a musical performance. See Baldesar Castiglione, Il Libro del Cortegiano (Torino: Einaudi 1965), 44.}

Later I came to learn that the skills demonstrated by Cut Chemist descended from iconic figures who were seminal to the birth of Hip Hop, among whom are Grandmaster Flash, DJ Jazzy Jay and Africa Bambata of the Zulu nation.^{[15]An early 1980s lesson on How to DJ-scratch with this DJ duo can be accessed at; for reflections on analogue Hip Hop’s longevity according to Grandmaster Flash, see} What many of these early hip hop artists were known to celebrate most about their own skillset was the ability to “humanize” technological music tools like turntables, electronic drum machines, samplers and synthesizers. To do this, they eschewed factory settings programmed into the equipment’s normal functions (quantization, for example, a process whereby out-of-time musical phrases are snapped into a timing grid automatically). They chose to denaturalize sounds they took as sampling source material by imposing, for instance, extreme equalisation (the process of enhancing or reducing the natural frequencies present in a given sound), editing (or chopping) and introducing noise into sourced material in order to either enrich (or phat-ten) or reformulate a recording.

Inevitably, turntable-manufacturing corporations in the United States, Germany, Japan and elsewhere were taking note of the ascendancy of the figure of the scratch DJ as this development would, no doubt, provide a commercial edge for growing sales. Technics was one such brand, which responded to the development of scratch technique by introducing innovations such as the direct drive turntables, effectively making their product one of the primary must-haves of top Hip Hop DJs (due to the direct drive’s more robust capabilities). According to Technics’ model SL-1200)  features list:

“The use of a newly developed coreless direct-drive motor with no iron core eliminates cogging^{[16]Rotation irregularity.}…/ [and] the twin-rotor construction reduces the bearing load while maintaining high torque and also reduces minute vibrations during rotation.”^[17]Technics

All of these factors made the SL-1200 an ideal instrument for the scratch DJ. When combined with a sampler, the duo of instruments transmogrified into the Hip Hop producer’s technolomagical light saber and jedi shield — a combination that began to define the sound of urban black music first in the USA and then, through cultural diplomacy (or more accurately, hegemony), began slowly but surely to redefine the sound of urban musics across the entire planet.

Sample in Digital

The digital sampler is another tool that has become exceedingly collectable. What the sampler offers in abundance is repetition, which is the structural key that unlocks most forms of music to new listeners. Without repetition, patterns within the music are rendered more difficult to discern and often this results in waning interest in those listeners expectantly awaiting the next cue.

The guitar and accessories manufacturer Ibanez, issued a rack mountable digital delay unit called the DM1100 in the mid-1980s. One of these units attracted the attention of composer-performer Pamela Z. Previously an opera singer and viola player who wrote and sang her own material, Pamela Z remembers how, “in the early ’80s I became interested in experimental music and electronic music and processing my voice with a digital delay. And that was a huge turning point.”^{[18]Quoted in Rodgers, Pink Noises, 217.}

The moment was a game changer for Pamela Z. She recalls spending the whole first night with her unit learning how to use it to loop and sample herself until the next morning. She continues her reflection:

I had been trying to do more experimental work, and somehow I couldn’t break through old habits, and I couldn’t find a new voice to do something different. When I started working with the delays, that was totally it for me. The delays have remained the mainstay of my gear, although now I am doing it Max/MSP.^[19]Ibid.

Pamela Z has had a particularly long “love affair” (as she calls it) with incorporating technolomagic (she calls it technologies) into her compositions and performances.^{[20]Lately, Pamela Z performs using a custom-made BodySynth which captures her muscle movements using electrode sensors so that she can translate these into sonic effects to fill the physical space during a live performance. As the scope of the present contribution surveys technolomagic prior to the age of internet, I will not elaborate on the evolution of the particular techniques she uses.} The work she generated prior to the dawn of the twenty-first century remains profoundly affective not only because it includes multidimensional aspects such as installation and sculpture; she has also continually engaged questions of gender and race as perennially fraught within the spheres of both experimental music (which she argues has often been constructed as the domain of white men) and electronica:

I began to realize that, for example, if I was ever on an electronic music compilation, I was usually the only woman on it, and usually the only person using voice. At one point I became interested in people who do extended vocal techniques, wild and interesting things with voice.^{[21]Ibid., 222.}

Curiously, Pamela Z comments that in her experience, the people who usually practice extended vocal techniques and electronic vocal processing are mostly women. The reason, she concludes, boils down to globally prevalent cultural norms:

Historically, women are socialized to use our bodies as a way of communicating with the world. And men are kind of uncomfortable in their bodies… basically, for them, they like to manipulate tools.^{[22] Ibid.}

Distinct from the tools adopted by Pamela Z, the premier sampling machine of Hip Hop’s early development was arguably Akai’s Music Production Controller or the “MPC” sampler. The figure in Hip Hop most often touted as one of the best at bending the sampler to his will was Detroit’s J Dilla (1974-2006). J Dilla belonged to a malleably configured coterie of Hip Hop musicians who went under the name of The Ummah (Arabic, meaning “community”). Members of the group were either committed Muslims or African-Americans who identified as allies to the faith. As British-raised Islamic scholar Habeeb Akande reminds us, Islam was considered as a liberation theology, and people of African descent in Brazil and in other parts of the African diaspora drew inspiration from a revolt staged by Yoruba Muslims in Bahia (Brazil) in a frontal challenge to their enslavement there during the year 1835.^{[23]Habeeb Akande, Illuminating the Blackness: Blacks and African Muslims in Brazil (London: Rabaah Publishers, 2016), 1.} Such tales of courageous political action filtered down through history to eventually influence young electronically-enabled musicians such as J Dilla and other members of The Ummah, who were responsible for inciting the underground Hip Hop scene of the late 1980s in the United States. Revered for his unique techniques of “idiosyncratic”, lo-fi, non-quantised drum programming partnered with rolled-off highs in the low-end frequency spectrum and his Moog synthesizer sub-basslines, J Dilla became a celebrated figure in music production circles whereas, in mainstream music circles of the time, the live instrumentalist rather than the DJ-producer was still touted as the “authentic” and therefore more superior musician.

The sampling musician and the DJ were subject to criticism as not authentically musical because their craft was premised on reformulating and manipulating recorded music created by others. As Margie Borschke points out, “we can trace contemporary notions about authenticity, copies, and originals to the development of romantic aesthetics in the eighteenth century.”^{[24]Margie Borschke, This is not a Remix: Piracy, Authenticity & Popular Music (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 20.} According to these principles, inherited from the Enlightenment, what was venerable included:

1) Placing emotion and intuition before (or at least on an equal footing with) reason; 2) a belief that there are crucial areas of experience neglected by the rational mind; and 3) a belief in the general importance of the individual, the personal and the subjective.^[25]Ibid

Borschke suggests that the principles enumerated above dictated how the critical mass in mainstream music parlayed creativity into notions of originality, authenticity and ultimately privacy and exclusivity in terms of property. On these terms, a sample or scratch technician such as the Hip Hop DJ or producer would be afforded little to no credibility as a musician.

If technical mastery and a resilience for daily practice at an instrument are to count for what makes a technical musician, J Dilla certainly qualifies. His upbringing was drenched with musical exposure: his mother was an opera singer while his father had dabbled in composition. He himself was a capable acoustic multi-instrumentalist who also appears to have been a voracious collector of all kinds of music on vinyl, as intimated in a documentary produced by Fuse entertainment channel.^{[26]See the “J Dilla: Crate Diggers”, episode available at.} So, what did J Dilla the producer and avid collector sample? His record collection houses a wide spectrum of music including funk, jazz, samba and many other genres.

Master of Synthesizers

While sample manipulators of the Hip Hop generation perfected the skill of borrowing from obscure recorded sounds of previous eras in the genres of funk, folk, jazz and soul, future-ready artists on the African continent borrowed influences and sound aesthetics that were temporally contemporaneous but spatially remote (from far across the seas in the west). Movements such as Zamrock (founded in Zambia by fans of western psychedelic rock), Congolese rumba (elevated in Mobutu’s Zaire and spearheaded by icons such as Franco and his band, OK Jazz) and Afrobeat (fronted by the legendary Fela Kuti as chief priest) transformed perceptions of continental music as Africa turned electric.

Often remembered in this category of Electric Africa is Cameroonian multi-instrumentalist and music scholar Francis Bebey, who between the years 1982 and 1984 recorded his brew of indigenous African music combined with electronic effects on amplified traditional and other instruments. The recordings were released under the title Psychedelic Sanza in 2014 by a label named Bad Boy Records in Paris, France. A prolific and rigorous researcher of the musics of Africa, Bebey exhibited an expansive view of the place of technology alongside more traditional modes of African musicking. As he wrote: “The tape recorder can enable a musician to discover his own music when he hears it for the first time.”^{[27]Francis Bebey, African Music: A People’s Art (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1999), 36.}

As a scholar, Bebey came across as a natural teacher who revelled in pedagogical stories and anecdotes. Additionally, his writing possesses a particular accessibility owing to his dedication to writing and communicating widely about his passion for African music and the opportunities he saw for the latter in tandem with technolomagic. This cannot necessarily be said of William Onyeabor.

Onyeabor is notorious as one of the most mysterious figures to emerge from the Electric Africa of the 1970s and ’80s. Alongside his own record-pressing plant in Enugu, he owned a studio complex stacked with psychedelic sequencers and synthesizers from Moog, drum machines from Roland, multitrack reel-to-reel tape decks and countless other futuristic and cutting-edge accoutrements. Onyeabor recorded and released some of the most distinctive music of the time, including a track called “Better Change your Mind” in which he berates global powers for threatening to plunge the world into nuclear Armageddon during the era of the Cold War. As he calmly intones:

America, do you ever think this world is yours?

And you Russia, do you ever think this world is yours?

You China, do you ever think this world is yours?

And you Cuba …/… if you’re thinking so my friends

Better change your mind

Onyeabor is said to have recorded, pressed and released no less than eight studio albums of his own between 1977 and 1985, following which he chose to retreat into near obscurity, apparently due to his new-found conviction as a Christian.^{[28]See the Luaca Bop special, Fantastic Man, here.}

Onyeabor, I propose, shares the label of avant-gardist Afrotechnolomagic sonic producer in diasporic Africa with the master upsetter himself, Lee Scratch Perry. Working from his Black Ark studio complex in Kingston, Jamaica, Perry combined extreme application of everyday studio effects such as tape delay, reverb and phasing between microphones, with a heady mix of what pundits have called voodoo to push the envelope on psychedelic reggae. According to British producer Martin Glover, Lee Scratch Perry is the grandfather of modern dance music.

Perry is a deeply spiritual man who follows the way of Rastafari as embodied by the Emperor Selassie of Ethiopia during his lifetime. Much like Onyeabor, Perry is an astute performer of the quirky (some would dare say the bizarre), which suits his production values of mystification, ambiguity and lyrical experimentalism. His production credits comprise a long list of some of the twentieth century’s most revered if diverse music, including (famously) Bob Marley and the Wailers, The Beastie Boys and The Clash.

Asked how he managed to produce the complex work he was making at the Black Ark using only a four-track Teac studio recorder, Perry retorts:

What was on the 4 was written on the machine but I was picking up 20 from the extra-terrestrial squad. That made me mad – I was so glad to meet that extra-terrestrial squad.

Asked to answer those who perceive him as a “crazy guy”, Perry shrugs:

People who are creative, they are like that. They are scientists. They are half human beings and they remember where they were originally from. Before I was a human being I was a fish.^{[29]Perry commenting in Lee Scratch Perry’s Vision of Paradise (film), dir. Volker Schaner (Fufoo Film, 2018), available at:}

Passed-down Noise

What I sought to elucidate here is the fact that Africa has always been in and of the world in terms of its participation in electronic music. My argument has been that while Pan African and diasporic influences on the “music of electrons” have always been extant, they have been progressively obscured or forgotten for a variety of reasons, amongst others a systematic impulse to exceptionalise western innovation as though it were self-generating and self-propelled. It is my hope that, in unfolding this argument, the extent to which the world (including the west and the so-called global north) has been informed by the practices of global Africa has become unambiguously clear. The fact that the Afrotechnolomagicians I mentioned drew much inspiration from African music principles, African history, African musicking and the African world view, should be indicative of how Africa has been a conceptual space, a framework and a filter through which much tech-enabled music has been conceived, articulated, packaged and disseminated.

There is a new generation of Electric Pan Africa that is now well-placed to transform these lingering perceptions of Africa within the field of electronic music. To my mind, the list includes such artists as Nancy Mounir, who works on breathing new life into archival music recordings of Egypt in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s and consolidates them with her Theremin, her acoustic bass and software; the outfit Dumama and Kechou, who pair live electronics with indigenous Xhosa instruments; and Msaki, who crafts protest songs as expressions of love, hope and collective freedom with a sampler, a guitar and logic.