Indigenous Music
- Sahil Desai
- 16 hours ago
- 3 min read
Connections sown in Cape Town take root in Nairobi, then trail lightly along the coast. I find my people at an event focused on coastal music, clothing, and culture in a small shop in Mombasa’s Old Town. Someone at the event tells me I should visit a music producer named KÜrïbã when I come to Kilifi.
He has a studio at a bar and restaurant space near the creek running through town, and tells me to stop by sometime after 3pm. I drive through the gate, park in the gravel lot, and walk through a quiet concrete structure toward the open-air restaurant overlooking the water. I ask where to find KÜrïbã’s studio, and the group lounging at one of the tables points to the second floor. Backtracking, I climb the stairs and leave my shoes by the two pairs already outside the door at the top.
We greet each other, and I set my tube of flutes in the corner of the room. After a few minutes we start playing with sounds. I’ve been learning Raag Desh for the past few months, and say that with flutes in four different scales we have plenty of space to experiment. We mix some phrases that I have memorized with KÜrïbã’s percussion, layering electronically until the melodies echo one another. A fine line between order and cacophony, but I think we find our balance. The sounds fit quite cleanly together, feeling more like siblings than strangers. In two hours we have a song. KÜrïbã suggests a Somali restaurant for dinner, and I drive across the bridge into the market to pick up food from Laza.
KÜrïbã is still at his computer when I return, experimenting with background effects to supplement the base material we’ve recorded. We start a second song with an idea that I’ve been thinking about for some time. Drones inspired by Sheila Chandra, an English musician of Indian descent whose transcendent voice graced the 1980s until burning mouth syndrome cut her career short in 2009. We pass single notes from the flute through filters, ending with a sound rooted in my breath yet unrecognizable as human-made. KÜrïbã layers additional percussion, and we shake to the rhythm.
Later, at a beachside restaurant, I tell a friend how we were mixing my traditional Indian flutes with KÜrïbã’s embodied East African sound. She says there are lots of Indians in Kenya but she has not heard mixed Indian and Kenyan music. I have heard this before. Despite a large South Asian population, few seem to have encountered these sounds. A friend in Nairobi shares my skepticism and introduces me to a tape, ‘Aterere’, a collaboration between Francis Njoroge and Papi Singh. It mixes traditional Bhangra beats with funky Afro-electro compositions, and is sung in Punjabi, Gikuyu, Swahili, and English. Perhaps their creation also happened quietly in a small studio overlooking a creek.
Deeper into the night two of KÜrïbã’s friends stop by and eat while we experiment. They ask where I am from.
“America”, I respond.
“Your music sounds very indigenous.”
“The flutes are indigenous Indian instruments, my parents are from India.”
“It even sounds like it could be from here.”
“You have these flutes in Kenya?”
“We are from Uganda and have something similar there. This is not a sound that comes from America.”
About the author: Sahil Desai is a writer, sound researcher, and musician tracing South Asian diasporic music across the African continent. Traveling by motorbike, he documents encounters with musicians, archives, and forms of cultural life that often sit outside official histories. His work attends to sound as a site of memory, circulation, and unfinished connection.
About the series: Riding With Sahil is part of Archives in Motion, a BlindianProject archival practice holding writing, sound, and visual work created while journeys are still unfolding.
Continue through the Archive
Archives in Motion: An initiative of BlindianProject — a living archive documenting Black × South Asian histories, encounters, and cultural exchange.
Comments