Listen Festival X Nyege Nyege X Pilar

Initiated by musician and artist Jonathan Saldanha (HHY & The Macumbas) during his Nyege Nyege residency, HHY & The Kampala Unit is a futuristic exploration of a fresh, yet submerse territory in music mixing up dub, techno, traditional drumming and elements of trance over ghostly and unnerving cinematic passages. A collaborative venture featuring visionary Saldanha on electronics and production, fierce trumpet player and ghetto activist Florence Lugemwa. Physical in its tactility and effect and highly evocative, all tracks are a gorgeous blending of cerebral virtuosity, cosmic creativity, raw energy and visceral sensuality that is majestically sculpted with haunting marching sounds, mutating percussive rhythms, variations and reprises against cascading electronics and rich, technicolor textures. A dramatic intensity builds up over time generating tension between rupture and stability, subtext and hyper-realism. Mesmerizing and infectious.

As a DJ, producer and artist based in Kampala, Uganda, Authentically Plastic’s sound is necessarily political. Dubbed “Demon of the Nile” by conservative Ugandan media & politicians, Authentically Plastic has never shied away from disrupting norms & expectations. They run a roving, riotous, club night in Kampala called ANTI-MASS which opens up space for femme, queer & experimental artists in an increasingly repressive social climate. Risk-taking in this political environment informs Authentically Plastic’s sound, which has an accelerated, densely layered, improvisational feel. Their sets, at once dark and playful, use Gqom, Vogue & Techno as a base for exploring other unknown sounds. Their music is influenced by anything from quasi-electronic Northern Ugandan rhythms, to early acid experiments and Afrofuturism.

The mysterious DJ/producer/multi-instrumentalist is also one third of HHY & the Kampala Unit where she plays the trumpet. Flo aka Florence Lugemwa is involved as a ghetto activist in her hometown (Kampala), were she teaches the kids and founded a brass band with them. She did one of her very first public appearances as a DJ for Nyege Nyege festival 2020, live on NBS (festival take-over on Ugandan national TV) and turned the crowd on fire with her set that she spiced up MC’ing on impro and drove the party into madness. She is working on her debut album that will be released later on Hakuna Kulala. DJing is a skill she honed over the pandemic and is already excelling at, tipped to become one of the toughest DJs coming out of the Nyege crew since DJ Kampire.