Although house music, techno, rock ‘n roll, jazz, and hip-hop are all products of Black culture, the story of Africa remains largely untold in modern popular music.
There have been some recent advances. The internet has helped dance subgenres like Afro House and Amapiano reach Western audiences. Furthermore, major artists such as Drake are incorporating these styles into their music, while Nigerian-born acts such as WizKid and Burna Boy are gaining serious traction. Looking to the past, certain African figures like Afrobeat inventor Fela Kuti and early electronic pioneer Francis Bebey are crucial to the history of music.
But given the sheer size and cultural diversity of the continent — which includes 1.6 billion people living in 54 countries and speaking over 2,000 languages — such awareness does not come close to demonstrating the full breadth of African musical creativity.
Guedra Guedra, the Moroccan experimental producer, notes that even music technology brands can inherently reject African culture by limiting African styles like polyrhythms and unconventional time signatures from their libraries of loops and samples. He’s had to manually program these types of patterns into Ableton and reassign step sequences to match traditional cycle lengths on his drum machines.
“Technology companies could integrate these presets easily, but until they do, the responsibility is on producers to hack and re-map their tools,” says Guedra Guedra, real name Abdellah M. Hassak.
Hassak is doing much more to honour his heritage than shifting things around in his DAW, though. On his new album, MUTANT, he sought to present Africa’s modernity and history through sound. He travelled to different African countries, including Egypt, Senegal, Mauritania, and Tunisia, gathering all manner of field recordings and integrating them into his brand of leftfield dance music.
“The African continent is vast, with a surface area roughly three times larger than that of Europe. Travelling across Africa has always been a dream for this project,” Hassak says. “Travelling to different African countries was not just about collecting sounds. It was about engaging with living archives. Each place carries its own sonic DNA, shaped by history, environment, and social rituals. Whether travelling physically, culturally, or intellectually, I wanted MUTANT to connect the rhythms of today to the ancestral pulse of the continent.”
Throughout his travels, he gathered any kind of audio that caught his interest. Musical performances, conversations, interviews, and atmospheric sounds. He would use mobile recording devices — a Zoom H4 and his iPhone — to capture them readily. He also gathered recordings from friends and fellow artists who live in different parts of Africa. Moving between countries can often be a complex process in Africa, as many require separate visas, and travel is generally expensive.
“Throughout my career, I have met many artists from across Africa, and we have built strong mutual support. Thanks to my network, I was able to access a wide range of sounds through their efforts, even without physically travelling to every place,” Hassak says, mentioning that people from around Africa sent him everything from their own field audio to vinyl samples to recordings of oral traditions.
Regardless of the recording sources, Hassak’s guiding principle comes from a Moroccan proverb told to him by his grandmother: “Jdid loo jadda o lbali latefarat fih,” which translates to “New things are good, but never abandon the old ones.”
“That wisdom has stayed with me in everything I do. Each voice, each environment, each accidental sound is part of a larger story about who we are and how we’ve come to be,” Hassak says. “Listening is not just about hearing, it’s about understanding, discovering, and allowing yourself to be reconstructed by what you encounter. The stories embedded in these recordings are not only about the people who told them, but also about the spaces, silences, and histories that shaped their words.”
Gathering these recordings as such made maintaining a consistent sound quality impossible, but that speaks to the idea of a story being told. If one piece of audio is low quality, that reflects how and why it exists. So, when Hassak was integrating them into the final masters, he would find ways to manipulate them into the music he made with his array of machines, creating a bespoke mesh of the organic and synthetic.
Technical perfection is secondary to the value of the sound itself for me
The centrepiece of Tribes With Flags is a spoken-word piece from French-Egyptian director, Jihan El-Tahri, surrounded by different sonic elements such as vinyl surface noise, tuned percussion, chopped up vocal samples, and electronic undertones. On The Arc of Three Colours, Hassek configures a traditional African call into reverberant, high-frequency coating.
“Technical perfection is secondary to the value of the sound itself for me. When making MUTANT, I refused to use AI tools to clean or isolate elements. The challenge was to work with the recordings as they were, fragmenting them and blending them with analogue machines and Ableton Live,” Hassak says. “This ‘mobile quality’ gave the sounds a unique texture that became a strength rather than a limitation, adding authenticity and depth to the final mix.”
To have maximum control over each sound, one tool he used was the Arturia DrumBrute, which allowed him to very intentionally manipulate each sound and place them within different sequences. “This separation was essential because it let me treat field recordings almost like individual instruments, shaping them alongside analogue percussion with precision,” Hassak says.
Many of the field recordings that ended up in the album weren’t the original form that Hassak gathered on the ground. He would find individual moments within them, such as a hand striking wood or the reverb of a voice, creating an overall sonic picture that was more fluid and nebulous than direct.
“These fragments would be layered with analogue beats, often built sound-by-sound rather than loop-by-loop, which gave the music a more organic and unpredictable pulse,” Hassak says, explaining how he reprograms African stylings into his machines. “I like to reduce the reliance on software at the early stages, letting the machines and recorded materials speak first. It’s a way of making music that’s almost archaeological: uncovering layers, recontextualising them, and allowing their original acoustic DNA to influence the rhythm and harmonic choices.”
Other times, happy accidents would occur when field recordings and other pieces of audio would converge in random ways:
“On Enlightenment, for example, the track began with a two-year-old synth improvisation that I rediscovered while archiving files. At the same time, a raw field recording was playing in the background. The unplanned collision of the two sounds immediately sparked the core idea for the piece,” Hassak says.
MUTANT is an album about collisions. Hassek collided with the cultures of his continent and grabbed the sounds that represented his experiences. He relied on other African artists he’s connected with to share their cultures through audio. Then he brought those sounds together with machines in his studio. The result is an authentic expression of African culture presented through a lens that modern audiences are poised to understand.
“When global attention is coupled with respect for origin and innovation rooted in tradition, it becomes a true dialogue rather than just a trend.”
Harry Levin is a freelance journalist with credits in SPIN, Billboard, MusicTech, Grammy.com, Los Angeles Magazine, and more. His musical journey began 20 years ago with a Led Zeppelin CD. He played jazz trombone through college, produced large-scale electronic music events, and now spends his professional time writing and editing.
