African electronic music in Quebec
I arrived in Montreal by train in the late afternoon. Walking through the departure hall I looked at the art deco bas-relief friezes on the walls of the main station concourse. I was impressed by the stylized white figures on a sky-blue background depicting Canadians engaged in various activites and livelihoods. I went on into the city’s historic district, admiring the 18th-century French architecture of Old Montreal.
I could picture the old town founded as a fur-trading post by Champlain, the French navigator, as I walked down the cobbled lanes of limestone buildings. He set up the town as a trading post for beaver pelts used to make the wide-brimmed felt hats popular with Europeans at the time. I watched as two middle-aged men and a woman rode by in a horse-drawn carriage. Gazing out at the backdrop of the old stone buildings, I was whisked back in time to the era of New France, absorbed by the colony’s mood and history.
In the late afternoon light I meandered along a cobblestone street at the end of which was a leafy square. A man wearing skinny jeans sat on a bench, rolling a cigarette. He said something in the Quebec vernacular to the guy sitting beside him as a man riding a thin-framed bicycle stopped by and joined them for a chat. I was enjoying the walk and the insight it was giving me into the daily life of the Quebecois.
I took a late lunch at a sidewalk bistro, where I continued watching the life of the city. Sitting at a sidewalk table, I ordered a boeuf bourguignon from the menu chalked up on the board. It was a good meal.
Across the street was a brasserie where I stopped and had coffee. I had the feeling that I was in Europe, sitting at the sunlit table on a cafe terrace to while away the hours with a coffee and croissant. I slathered some jam on a fluffy croissant.
Fortified with caffeine, I walked on, past a wine merchant and a French bakery. I glanced through the window at stacks of baguettes, enticed by the aroma drifting out through the door. Later I browsed the galleries and boutiques of Rue Saint-Paul, the old main street.
The next day I rode over to Le Plateau in an Uber. I got out and soon came to a poutine stand where I bought a container of lumpy poutine. Like so many traveler I felt I needed to indulge in this popular dish that orinigated in Quebec. Walking along enjoying the french fries smothered in brown gravy and cheese curds I came to a street of colorful row houses with iron spiralling staircases. I passed vintage clothing stores, eateries, coffee shops.
The queue outside of Kem CoBa, the artisanal ice cream shop, snaked around the block. The shop, with a bright pink and neon green façade, served up exotic flavors like durian, lychee and hibiscus. I took my place in line and after a twenty minute wait was stoked to have a chai tea ice cream cone in my hand. I stopped on the way for some Montreal bagels at St-Viateur. A man with heavy-lidded eyes kneaded the dough in an open kitchen. On the wall were sepia-tinged newspaper clippings and black and white photos of notable patrons like Leonard Cohen, the local poet and singer. At the counter I ordered some bagels with sesame seeds. I took a bite of a moist, hand-rolled bagel. It was fresh and flavourful and certainly deserved its reputation.
The hostel I was staying at had impersonal hallways. I walked down gloomy, smoke-veiled corridors where shadows slipped in and out of doorways. The tin-clunk of a soda dropping out of a vending machine sounded somewhere in the distance. My steps echoed against the walls of the yellow stairway.
I pushed open the heavy door and stepped onto the deck where the roof provided me with a magical, panoramic view of the city lights. In the hazy distance, long ribbons of illuminated roads and buildings, like bridges of gold, connected the mirage city to a far-away land.
That night I headed downtown on the metro to check on a friend who was working at a restaurant. Zoe was a dark-haired woman who wore a white dress shirt and worked as a server at a French restaurant. It was an elegant restaurant with crisp, white table cloths set with fine china and silverware.
A young couple came into the restaurant. Taking some menus from the hostess stand, Zoe came over to seat them. She explained the specials and took the drink orders. Waiting for her to get off from work, I sat at the bar and ordered a club soda. Bored, I watched the bartender steam-clean a glass. Zoe came out from the kitchen carrying stacked plates along her arms.
During a pause in service, she came over to the bar.
“How’s it going tonight?” I asked.
“Pretty busy,” she said, “We still on for later?”
“Yeah.”
We were going to see AfrotroniX, the music project of Caleb Rimtobaye, a Chadian guitarist living in Montreal. He played electronic music with the African-tinged beats that I liked. I had missed seeing him at an electronic music festival in Toronto, and it was one of the reasons I had come to Montreal.
At the end of Zoe’s shift we walked over to the venue. Partgoers scuttled about the nightlife streets, crowding the sidewalks, reveling in the cluster of bars with loud laughter and drunken shouting. I caught the eyes of a waifish girl teetering on spiked heels, checking her phone.
Zoe and I entered Chalmuns. There was a biomechanoid sculpture at the entrance of the concave club. Tork the bouncer checked his datapad to see we were on the list and motioned us in. Walking through some blast doors and a droid detector we came into a white-walled passageway. I took in the club. With a white dome, sandstone walls and droid parts scattered about, the place had the look of an illegal spice den. I was in a realm of strangeness now. I had a transit-zone feeling as I was always on my way to somewhere else and the places I passed through became a landscape of my own invention.
The place was populated by a bizarre assortment of people—freighter pilots and Jawa merchants, spice smugglers and Corellian pirates, spacers from the frontier planets of the Outer Rim Territories. Dainty effeminate waiters with Tin Tin haircuts were serving drinks. Was this a congregation of cosplay characters or was I operating on a different plane, journeying to the past worlds of Star Wars?
I ventured up some industrial-looking metal steps to an iron catwalk high above the dance floor. I looked down at the DJ, his fingers flickering over the mixer as he worked the turntables. He knew how to drive a dance floor. The sound of blasterfire cut through the speakers, strobelights strafing the bodies on the dancefloor. I was temporarily entranced by the freeze-frame strobes.
After a few drinks at the bar I headed towards the bathrooms. The walls were scribbled with wild-style graffiti and scuffed with blaster marks. Zoe was standing in line at the girls’ bathroom, the sign on the door written in alien writing. In the men’s bathroom, a stall-door was off its hinges from blaster damage. Scribbled on a stall door was the name and phone number of the bar slut who’d slept with some of the regulars. I came across some Nigerian pictographs. Were these the strange symbols of some bizarre primordial cult? Perhaps. Was I trespassing on someone’s sacred turf? It was hot in the club and I was pretty tired, so I went over to the sink and splashed cold water on my face to refresh myself.
A black guy with dreads appeared suddenly from a stall, his eyes ablaze, the dark pupils piercing the whites of his eyes. Small bells dangled from his orange dreadlocks. He was a random weirdo, a space-rasta. He looked like someone you’d meet at the canteen in the Mos Eisley Spaceport on Tatooine.
Minutes later, Jane came out of the bathroom. She said hi to the spacer with orange dreads and introduced us. He was called Dak and worked in club promotions, running a night called Phuture Afrika, booking DJs and putting on parties like this one. He was an interesting guy.
The three of us went over to a U-shaped bar. Behind it was a mural of a binary sunset over some Mali pyramids. A bartender with a bulbous nose was shaking cocktails. Some people were perched on bar stools made from droid shells. Dak gave a casual nod to the bartender stirring a blue milk cocktail with a swizzle stick who then slid it towards him. I grabbed the stool next to Zoe. She ordered a Tatooine Sunset, a cocktail made from the fermented pears of the sand planet. I ordered an ice-filled glass of Jawa Juice. When we got our drinks, she tipped her glass at me and we clinked glasses. She took a sip and ran her tongue over her lips. She glanced at Dak sidelong.
“What are you drinking?” she asked him.
“A Blue Milk Beru,” he said. “Made from the milk of female banthas.”
“Straight from Aunt Beru’s kitchen?”
“You got it.”
I reached for my Jawa Juice and raised the glass, tinkling the ice cubes. I stared at my drink as pieces of what looked like bantha hide and fermented grains floated to the top. I reluctantly took another gulp.
A blonde man next to me at the bar was drinking a green cordial liquor. He had a boyish, sensitive face and wore a faded white tunic, leather utility belt and beige pants. I pictured him living on a moisture farm on the planet Tatooine, hunting womp rats in his T-16 on the desert flats.
A wall-mounted viewscreen showed spliced footage from the Star Wars films—a viper droid patrolling the ice plains of Hoth, a squad of death troopers in black body armour, and the ruins of the Massassi temple, the terraced jungle pyramid on Yavin 4 moon.
At the back of the club, the DJ looked down at the decks as he worked the controls. The music had started with low, vocal snatches of African chants. He faded out the beat. Then came a slow build, the bass-throb, the pulsating strains, and warbled vocals with whooshing effects and skittering beats that peaked the music. The repetitive beats were hypnotic. The DJ moved the faders and mixed in a house track by South African DJ Black Coffee.
There was an illicit mood in the club. A trafficker wearing a brown leather jacket and protective goggles, leaning against the bar, seemed to be arguing with a soldier from the Guavian Death Gang. The soldier wore red cybernetic armor and answered back in a modulated voice about a spice shipment coming in from an uncharted settlement.
When the DJ took a break, the music continued from the bandstand where a group of Bith musicians with large domed heads blew into the mouthpieces of kloo horns. A cretinous man with yellow eyes stood in a distant alcove, chittering to a hooded creature. Some money surreptitiously changed hands for what looked like metal vials of hyperfuel. The cretin probably needed the credits to buy a new speeder bike, having lost his old one gambling on a brutal droid cage match.
Dak and Zoe came back to join me and talk soon shifted to electronic music. Dak was big on the genre and could discuss the sonic texture of everything from the ambient mood of space music to the stark, synthetic beats of Detroit techno. He talked about the alchemists who explored the sounds of experimental music, dropping the word afrofuturist into the conversation. It was something he knew a lot about, and he got to explaining some of the apostles.
“First came Sun Ra,” he said, “a cosmic jazz musician who believed you could get telepathic powers through music. Claimed he was abducted by aliens and taken to Saturn. The mothership in alien abductions is often a metaphor for the slave ships of the Middle Passage.
“His avatar was a black alien pharaoh who’d never been born. He often wore a black caftan and a pharaoh’s headdresses. But man, his regal garments sure looked cheap and homemade.”
Suddenly Dak’s attention started to drift as he got lost in the music coming from the bandstand. His eyes grew unfocused and he seemed to be off in another world.
“What was I saying?”
“Something about Sun Ra.”
“Right, so his group the Arkestra come into Oakland adorned as gods of ancient Egypt. All these hieroglyphic symbols like the ankh and the eye of Horus on their costumes. Pretty talented group. They play electronic music with all kinds of instruments—a space organ, a sun harp, a Moog synthesizer. Sun Ra wants the people to get in tune with the universe by bringing them a music that coordinates with their spirits. You can check out his teachings in this sci-fi film called Space is the Place.”
“Never heard of it,” I said, “What’s it about?”
“It’s a tripped-out film. In it, Sun Ra plays cards for the fate of black people with the Overseer, a supernatural pimp dressed in a white suit. He wants the people to continue being deceived with sensual pleasures, but Sun Ra wants to liberate them.
“Anyway, after his abduction, Sun Ra returns to earth. But get this, his return has no technical requirments. His yellow spaceship is made of papier maché, it’s powered by music and lands in the Oakland ghetto. Sun Ra and his crew, they’re a bunch of musical astronauts.
“He comes to introduce us to experimental electronics.” Dak said. “Takes his message to the young bloods hanging out in a community centre.”
Dak told me how Sun Ra spoke to the young blacks of an alter-destiny, telling them he came from the other side of time. Since he was into black uplift, he started an outer space employment agency and recruited space settlers to musically teleport them to some cosmic utopia. He was not a separatist though. The applicants could be white or black, any like-minded people. Anyone of the black spirit could join the space program.
“Sounds a bit like George Clinton,” I said. “Didn’t he also have a spaceship and dress all weird and futuristic?”
This got Dak talking about George Clinton, the funk mastermind with rainbow dreadlocks.
“Said he was born in an outhouse—so he’s got a legit claim to funk, since he was born in it. He wears knee-high silver boots. Sometimes a fur cape. The Mothership is crewed by Clinton and the P-funk players, space voyagers wearing futuristic costumes. Sometimes for fun, he wears an array of crazy top hats, fedoras, military hats, hats topped with bird wings or giant white horns, even bed sheets scribbled on with crayons. And it keeps getting weirder and weirder.”
“The space parties on the Mothership were pretty wild,” Zoe interjected.
“Yeah,” Dak said, “The Mothership came to Earth to bring the funk to mankind. In P-Funk mythology there’s Starchild, an alien being. He’s the protege of Dr Funkenstein.”
“Who?”
“The alter ego of George Clinton. He’s the intergalactic master of outer space funk. The secrets of funk are encoded in the pyramids of Egypt built by ancient aliens and Dr Funkenstein has returned to release the funk trapped in the pyramids.”
“Come again?”
“I’m telling you, it’s weird. The villain in the story is Sir Nose D’Voidoffunk. There’s no funk in him. Too cool to dance, he wants to stop the funk and give party people a ‘placebo mind.’ He uses the snooze gun to do that. It causes the placebo syndrome which affects people taken in by consumerism and people who listen to disco.”
Dak explained how the troupe was trying to get away from disco which was too sterile.
“It had no stank,” he said, “no musk.”
“So Starchild shoots the Nose with the bop gun which causes people to dance.” Dak took a sip of his blue milk cocktail and went on. “The concerts were dope too. One of the coolest things they had was this stage prop vehicle, a levitating spaceship. All blinking with strobes of colored lights and smoke and shit. ”
Dak was still talking about electronic music when Zoe decided she’d heard it all before and took off. Dak went on about Tanzanian singeli, a frenetic gabba-like dance music with a tempo up to 300 beats per minute, a mashed-up urban sound of afro-punk that came out of the slums of Dar es Salaam. The production of African club music was accelerated by access to fast internet and computer software. Self-taught bedroom producers were creating new sounds in places like Nairobi and Cape Town, the hubs for electronic music coming out of the continent. Dak mentioned how African producers were putting out tracks that blend synthetic sounds with ancestral music.
“Caleb sings in Sara,” he said, mentioning the musician we were going to see tonight, “Sara is a language of Chad. Electronic music blends well with African sounds and rhythms ”
He started talking AfrotroniX now, about the artist Caleb Rimtobaye. The afrofuturist musician was part of the sonic identity of an emerging urban Africa. He wanted his music to take listeners on a virtual journey to the continent in the year 2050.
As I was listening to Dak, the Jawa Juice started to affect me. My inebriated thoughts carried me to the homeworld of the Berber nomads, to the landscape that inspired the music. My mind traveled beyond the club to the dune ranges of North Africa. I imagined the look of the land, the feeling of vastness, the isolation, the look of the arid Tataouine district in southern Tunisia, a filming location of Star Wars. I was transported to another world as the twin suns began to set over the vast desert mesa.
Escaping in my space fantasy, I was lifted by a mild current, gliding over the scavengers trekking across the western Dune Sea. Their rusted bulk of an old mining transport moved on treaded wheels across the sand, the cargo holds of the abandoned ore haulers containing scrap metal salvaged from the ancient sea basin. I flew over a tribe of Tusken Raiders in tattered bandages and gauze, raiding the settlements of outlanders, a shroud of dust as they merged into the stark landscape, nomadic bandits blending with the land, the mesa rock of the Jundland Wastes.
I was soon gliding over a long stretch of arid land with sandstone caverns. I hovered and swept above a domed white stucco home. I could see the white pods of a spaceport settlement in the distance as I soared over underground cave dwellings. The main living pit of a desert homestead was a large circular courtyard in a crater with arched doors and cave rooms dug into the sandstone walls. In the courtyard a moisture farmer in a dusty beige tunic checked a vaporator condensing water from the dry air.
The steady thumping of music jarred me out of my reveries. There was a sudden sense of the bizarre, a sense of being cut loose from the imaginary to the mundane. Feeling strange from drinking too much Jawa Juice, I sat despondently in a corner booth, my thoughts racing—censored by people around me. They seemed to know what I was thinking. Distrust targeted everyone I misunderstood through a frightened paranoia—afraid they would ask me where I was from. What would I tell them? Why couldn’t I shake this nagging feeling of alienation
The club had filled up more by now. The milling crowd by the stage waited for the set to start. After a while, Caleb ambled onstage. Dressed in a white uniform, he wore a white plastic helmet that had a futuristic look. It was inspired by the Do masks, a headdress worn by boys of his tribe after living in the bush as an initiation into manhood. He strapped on his guitar and plugged into an amplifier. As he played his fingers moved nimbly over the frets.
The drummer wore a similar red robot helmet. Another man, wearing a white jackal mask, danced in front of a screen of undulating lines of light. The set blended the machine sounds of electronic music and the digital art of video games. Caleb was a technoid, an afro-alien fusing the film Tron with the band Daft Punk. The white-helmeted musician played Lingala guitar on Petit Pays, a song about his obscure country.
During the set break I walked away from the stage, away from the crowd, through a white tubular tunnel into a corridor with titanium grey wall panels. I looked around the hallway. By a tractor beam power terminal stood a statue of a stormtrooper, its armored plating made of white plastoid.
A film being projected on the wall showed footage of a starfighter attack on the Death Star, its equatorial trench visible on the moon-sized battle station. Turbolaser fire from a Star Destoyer seared a burning black gash into the side of a Y-wing starfighter. In the cockpit a pilot in an orange flight suit spoke into his helmet’s headset. Accelerating the fighter, he went into a dive and fired its laser cannons at the Star Destroyer. Blue electric bursts streaked across the control bridge and communication towers of the massive ship.
An X-wing fighter swooped into a trench run, dodging laser fire from the turret cannons of the Death Star. Green laser bolts streaked from a TIE fighter coming in fast behind it. Flak exploded from the rapid burst of laser fire that took out the deflector shields. The X-wing veered, went into a spin and then hurtled into a trench wall with a fiery explosion.
I arrived back at the stage for the start of the second set. Caleb was jumping up and down, twirling around, then bobbing and weaving like a boxer, working off the energy he got from the crowd. Then he went over to the laptop and tapped on the keyboard. He was playing electronic beats mixed with Sahel blues and the Mandingo music of West Africa.
