#Huru grew so fast!!!!!!!!

[sf9]

precious cat dad Zuho 🐱💖

#sf9 #kreativesnet #zuho #baek juho #juho #cats #animals #mine #sf9: gifs #gifs: juho #Huru #I THOUGHT THAT WAS LOUI #BUT THAT'S HIS THIRD CAT???? KKOMPANG???? #JUHO THIRD WIN XD #this vlive with his cats was adorable T^T #Huru grew so fast!!!!!!!! #he reminds me so much of my own cat ksbdhbdhbd #Juho's literally the 'gently holds' meme

[berlysbandcamp]

“I hate when someone tells me I don’t sound African,” says Ukweli, the youngest member of East African Wave—or EA Wave for short. “What am I supposed to do, put Conga drums on all of my tracks? My music is African by virtue of me being African.”

The 21-year-old is one-fifth of EA Wave—a group of five DJs and music producers who, over the last couple of years, have created a small scene in Nairobi around their style of electronic music: an amalgamation of trap, house, trip-hop, and downtempo beats.

The busy capital city—where the boys grew up—is the economic hub of East Africa, attracting musicians from all over the region. Every night, the lively downtown bars move to the syncopated melodies of benga, the Cuban son-influenced rhythms of rhumba, and fast-paced soukous. Still, the airwaves are dominated by highly commercial, western-influenced R&B, Jamaican dancehall, and Nigerian Afrobeat.

But because there’s still a high level of “gatekeeping” around what gets played on radio and television, it’s been close to impossible for up-and-coming, non-commercial local artists to get their voices heard.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, Kapuka and Genge—two styles of homegrown reggae-infused hip-hop, which are topped off with local slang—gave a fleeting insight into the culture of the young urban population of Nairobi. “That is the music we grew up on,” Ukweli says. “It was dope at the time, but it did not keep growing and stopped representing us.”

“So we started making the music we wanted to hear,” Nu Fvunk adds.

If ever there was a group that epitomizes the idea of “World Music 2.0,” EA Wave is it. That term, coined by New York’s Jace Clayton, aka DJ Rupture, refers to the music that’s being made in all corners of the globe by kids with inexpensive laptops and free music production software. They use ingenuity to mould their own identity.

Jinku is one of their most prominent members.  “If you know Jinku, you know EA Wave,” say the group’s other members. Named by The Faderas one of the 25 global acts to watch out for, Jinku fuses trap 808s, afro-house and downtempo beats with African percussion. “I gravitate towards traditional drum sounds, but I don’t feel bound by them,” says Jinku, whose aesthetic is perhaps the most Afrocentric out of the five. “Going back to my roots and visiting Seychelles, discovering that sensual sound, had big impact on my music and helped ground it.” Jinku is also a member of Santuri Safari, a loose network of musicians, DJs and producers who aim to bridge the gap between traditional East African sounds and the international dance scene.

-  Megan Iacobini de Fazio

#R&B/Soul #Nairobi #Kenya