Fulu Miziki & Faizal Mostrixx (The DRC/Uganda)

The words Fulu Miziki roughly translates as “music from garbage”. In a literal sense, it is actually a quite accurate description of this thrillingly chaotic Eco-Friendly-Afro-futuristic-Punk-Ensemble collective. They are time travelers, artists from a future where humans have reconciled with mother earth and with themselves. Since 2020, Fulu Miziki has taken the European music festival circuit by storm, playing at numerous music venues, festivals and running workshops with the youth.

The multidisciplinary collective of artists is based in the Congolese capital city Kinshasa. For several years now, its members have spent an amount of time conceptualizing an orchestra made from objects found in the trash, constantly changing instruments, always in search of new sounds.

Making their own instruments, performance costumes, and masks is essential to Fulu Miziki’s musical core ideology. Their sound promotes a pan-African message of artistic liberation, peace and a serious look at the ecological situation of the Democratic Republic of Congo and the whole world. There is still hope - for Fulu everything can be recovered and re-enchanted.

Faizal Mostrixx

Faizal Mostrixx is one of the most original talents to emerge from the new East African arts scene. A stalwart of the explosive Kampala electronic music scene, he has collaborated with the Nyege Nyege collective and appeared at the collective’s festivals as well as the Bayimba festival. On Mutations (2023), his first album on Glitterbeat, Mostrixx presents his Afrofuturistic vision for music in clear and convincing ways.

As a dancer, Mostrixx embraces breakdance, body-popping, traditional African and experimental contemporary forms. As a producer, his vision of East African electronic music is a tapestry of polyrhythms, modern dancefloor styles, amapiano, Nile basin ceremonial chants and Pan-African field recordings. It is not a translation of African sounds, it is unmistakably Ugandan, yet like no other Ugandan music ever made before.

“Afrofuturism is a way to describe the meeting of the electronic and the tribal. It’s about bringing the past into the now and then imagining how it could be expressed in the future,” Faizal Mostrixx has explained. His interest is “to give African traditional instruments and organic rhythms a poetic electronic instrumentalism and to tell stories to the world that have never been told before”. With Mutations, he has done just that.

DJ Nora Pagu is a board member and festival friend and works at The Conduit. Nora likes to mix R&B and trap, with afrobeat, afrohouse, gom-ish, grime, 2step, melodic techno and North African and Sudanese electronica.

Endre 3000 plays electronic music from the Nyege Nyege universe, exploring futuristic movements, especially where music from the north, south, east, and west intersect. Expect programmed drums approaching the speed of sound, colliding with traditional instruments as well as sophisticated synths.

Endre 3000 is the DJ alias of cultural journalist, editor, and label manager for Digital Diaspora: Endre Dalen.