The Trance-Inducing Electronic Sounds From Sisso and Maiko
The Tanzanian DJ-producer duo, Sisso and Maiko, are pushing the frontiers of the singeli sound.
Sisso and Maiko at their Boiler Room performance in Berlin earlier this year.
Three months ago, the duo of Sisso and Maiko performed an electric set at the Boiler Room Festival in Berlin, Germany. For over 50 minutes, the Tanzanian duo carried the room on the frenetic, fast-paced loops that characterizes singeli, a sound emerging from Dar es Salaam.
Singeli also forms the sonic core of Singeli Ya Maajabu, the duo’s debut album together. Meaning Singeli of Wonders in English, the album sees Sisso and Maiko continue to push the bounds of their artistry. Sisso, who’s a creative figurehead for the singeli sound, places its trance-inducing rhythms around 200BPM, while drawing inspiration from nearby influences such as Zanzibar’s taarab music and local dance forms. The album also sees him incorporate newer elements such as techno and hip-hop into the mix, realizing a fine mosaic of sound that is propelled by Maiko’s production.
Maiko plays a Yamaha electronic piano and a controller keyboard, which he connects to FL Studio where he infuses extra percussion and bass. A prodigy of some sorts, he won countless regional awards from his early career before he made the move to Dar es Salaam, where he met Sisso. With similar influences and a shared vision for experimentation, both of them became the perfect creative partners.
Expectedly, the sound is stuffed, an organized chaos that plays into singeli’s overarching motive: to make bodies move in dance. Thus, Singeli Ya Maajabu propels the genre’s vision but also the duo’s instinct for the unexpected.
When one goes through the 14-track album, it’s easy to see why Sisso and Maiko — and singeli in general — has been attracting so much global attention. It’s music that is intensely rooted in the present moment, in the thrill and color of dance, but by virtue of its sonic choices, it also nods to the future; to an effervescent world of possibilities. It’s a success of collaboration that Sisso and Maiko are able to create such a seamlessly cohesive project.
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