Hybridity in Music: The FLEE Project & Extra Muros Residency
Music, and the culture that surrounds it, has been coursing through a long moment of hybridity. In thinking of the way sound travels alongside culture – and within it – we could start at several points along history, but no moment seems as deliberate as that in which we currently find ourselves; we are no longer at the mercy of the slow, unintentional crawl of time. Those in the business of music are actively stretching across spaces, stitching together what they find, bringing the hybrid experience of music closer in an expedited evolutionary fashion. This is where the FLEE Project positions itself. Founded by Alan Marzo, Olivier Duport and Carl Åhnebrink, FLEE started out in 2017 while Alan was living in Kenya. Today, FLEE describes itself as “a cultural engineering platform dedicated to the documentation and enhancement of hybrid cultures”.
FLEE Project Team
I sit down with Alan, Olivier and Carl by the pool at Distant Relatives Restaurant in Kilifi, a charming small town on Kenya’s coast. The East African coastline bears a storied history of its own hybridities – as a site of cultural and socioeconomic exchanges, communities from across the Indian Ocean have been meeting and mingling here for hundreds of years prior, and it seems fitting that the FLEE Project, via its Extra Muros Residency that brought together music makers from Europe and Kenya, spent a significant amount of time here – going all the way north to Lamu, coming to Kilifi, and finishing its coastal foray in Mombasa.
The FLEE project started out as an exploration of Benga music which resulted in the release of a publication and vinyl compilation. Benga, a Kenyan Kaleidoscope, is a book FLEE released in September 2019 in collaboration with the British Institute in East Africa (BIEA). Before its release, it was exhibited in July 2018 in Switzerland.
“We decided to take the example of Benga as it was also quite symbolic for the more general phenomenons we are trying to tackle in our approach,” says Olivier, “the exchanges, the distribution of culture and music, more specifically, from north to south, and the other way around.” Putting this in context, it heightens our appreciation for how Kenya, even historically, serves as a dynamic nexus at which music is pushed towards new frontiers, something that is seen even today.
“What we want to put in relief, what we want to enhance, are the hybrid music genres,” Carl says. “Benga is a hybrid music genre because it’s a mix between the Luo nyatiti, guitars were brought by the Brits, and at the same time you obviously had the Congolese influence, which itself was influenced by the Cubans. So it is already a product of globalisation.”
The question of authenticity is never too far whenever we think of the ways influences are taken up and spread around in art, especially when this happens across distances considered too far to bear any relevant similarities. Perhaps it is not so much about what is authentic, as it is where the borders lie, and FLEE’s mandate seems to be to stretch this boundary so that it doesn’t exist. This is echoed by Nick, one of the participating artists, when we sit down for a chat. “No country,” he says, “I come from the world.” Alan expands on this thought in explaining what FLEE attempts to do. “Instead of staying in this kind of debate that we think is not really useful, is it really African, is it really Kenyan, or is it contaminated, somehow, by globalisation and digitization, we want to say it’s hybrid,” he says, “and that’s the hybridity we want to document.”
Over the course of the Extra Muros residency, ideas in forming composites in music weren’t being thought through only at a large scale, but in the minutiae of music-making as well. “We went out to Lamu to collect sounds the other day, and now through that approach, I learnt how to use textures and different things in my music rather than just using programmed sounds all the time,” Jinku, another participant in the Extra Muros residency, says, as he and other participants join me by the pool to talk about their experiences so far throughout the residency. “It was pretty dope.” Jinku is formally known as Jacob Solomon, and is a tribal downtempo artist well-known in the Nu Nairobi scene as 1/5th of EA Wave. Joseph Kamaru, stage name KMRU, also participating in Extra Muros, is a sound artist whose meticulously arranged and transcendent sonic landscapes are a direct outcome of his intense but playful creative technique. He has started dabbling in artificial intelligence, as well. “I’ve started working with artificial intelligence in some of my projects, trying to understand how machine learning works with sounds,” he says. “I think, as a musician, and as a sound artist, you need to keep up with what’s happening with technology, and staying open minded with all this hybrid kind of sound happening everywhere. You have to be open with what’s coming your way.”
Given the ubiquity and accessibility of technologies that assist and participate in transfers of musical knowledge, ideas and processing, made even more widespread via the internet, hybridity of musical cultures is something that happens both deliberately, and inevitably. “It’s important to keep open.” says Pier Alfeo, a sound artist from Italy taking part in Extra Muros, who gives an interview on his work here that provides an insight into the fascinating ways he thinks through the complexities of sound. FlexFab, another Extra Muros participant and Swiss DJ and producer, who in the past has collaborated with Muthoni the Drummer Queen, agrees. “It’s natural to be influenced by different music and culture,” he says. “For me, it’s part of my musical universe.” But because of this openness, this vast marketplace of influences, the exchanges happen on a shorter cycle, with attention (and hype) constantly shifting from idea to idea within the music industry. Following this, the idea of a sonic signature, and it’s importance, might be difficult to maintain for artists. The field has both expanded, and contracted at the same time. “I’m always thinking about the future,” KMRU says. “For me, personally, the music I’m making, I want it to be covering a wide range. It can be identifiable and evolving for the guys who are doing something with the sound later in the future.”
At the same time, staying present and honest to this particular moment is its own gift to the future. “I think of making music like taking a photograph,” Jinku says. “That’s what I think of when making a song – I’m just being honest to the present moment.” It’s also a lesson for those of us on the receiving end of music – how do we engage with it, how do we participate in propelling it in a particular direction without succumbing to the superficiality of consumerism, and how do we let it make it’s meaning now, and here, even as it might be going back and forth, taking influences from several scenes? Artists, then, are tasked with something bigger than just bringing sound together in one place. “More than a scene, it’s about teaching people how to listen,” Pier says.
Music remains, like all other art forms, an extension of the artist. Even as hybridity brings closer to us a wide range of influences, cultures and ideas, on many levels, the connection the artist has to the work they put out is a deeply personal one – one that sometimes might be at odds with the demands of the industry. “As a musician you have a challenge, like, to try and find your sound,” KMRU says. “But eventually I realized if you stay very honest with yourself as a person, and with the music you’re doing, the sound usually just comes, and eventually, people start realising that your particular sound comes from the heart. It’s very hard to stay authentic, because you’re trying to entertain people. You have to stay very authentic with yourself, and what you’re creating.” And this goes back to finding a signature sound. “A sound is like your taste; you like this type of frequency, this type of sound,” Jinku says. “I feel like it all boils down to personality, and if you’re really true to yourself and true to what you produce, then there’ll be a signature sound without you trying to find it.”
At its core, the FLEE Project is all about stretching limits. “We aim mainly to be interdisciplinary,” Alan says. “We aim to bring a fresh aesthetic to the music.” But as with all ideas that don’t conform to the norms that pre-date them, care has to be taken in how this project is conceptualized, and engaged with. “It’s important for us to have the time and space to explain our approach and the phenomenons we tackle and interest ourselves in,” Carl says. “It all comes down to finding the right persons.”
The FLEE Project has some exciting work in the pipeline, from a documentary retracing the process of this Extra Muros Residency, to the release of a vinyl comprising the contemporary reworking of sounds recorded in the last century in Italy, a project that KMRU will be involved in. For a project that’s only in its second year, FLEE is already engaging with critical ideas in a remarkable, refreshing way.
“We don’t want to fall into the trap of clichés,” Alan says. “For us, contextualization, explanation, reflection – even if it’s critical about our own approach – is important.”
