MC Yallah and Debmaster promise you energy, happiness and joy in their Australian concerts!

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Ugandan rapper MC Yallah and Berlin-based French producer Debmaster are coming to Australia for the WOMADelaide, Pitch and Art After Dark festivals from tomorrow night. We spoke to each of them. Read our interviews with them below.

MC Yallah, you’ve been a hip hop artist since you were 10. How did you start out? Did you have family members or friends who introduced you to hip-hop?

Yes, definitely. My brothers introduced me to hip-hop music. They used to play a lot of Fugees, Timbaland and the late Maggo, Tupac Shakur, Notorious Biggie and Lost boys.

Your songs are in 4 languages: Luganda, Ludo, Kiswahili and English – what are the non-English songs about? Do you cover particular themes in your music?

Usually my topics are about life, women empowerment, encouraging human beings to work in order to survive, love, calling for us to walk in love and in peace with each other instead of fighting one another, wars in different parts of the world, unfairness of politicians and their lies.

You’ve said that it’s about “the impact you leave on them”. From videos I’ve found on YouTube your performances are high energy and have everyone up on their feet dancing. What is the impact you want to leave on people?

Memories, joy, happiness and healing.

Even if they don’t understand the lyrics, do you ever explain the meaning of the songs to your audiences?

Yes, sometimes, I do though not on all songs but i usually see people moving, connecting to the different energies I use in the songs because every song is with emotions /expressions eg. if it’s a happy song they will be happy if it’s a sad one they will know that it’s a sad song. It amazes me how music speaks to the soul. I usually use expressions according to the way the song is designed for my audience to have a clue of what i may be communicating.

What can people expect of your performances at WOMADelaide, Pitch Festival and Art After Dark?

They should expect energy, happiness and joy throughout the whole set.

Why should people come see you at WOMADelaide, Pitch Festival and Art After Dark?

Because i am one of the greatest Artists/Performers in the world with a Talent that people all over the world should partake in.

How did you come to work with Debmaster?

Deb The Master – lol that’s what I call him because he is a master pro at the game – I met him through Arlen of Nyege Tapes and we starting working together in 2017 through internet on a track which was released later in 2018. He could send beats, I record here in Uganda and use the stems he sent [stems are individual audio tracks that comprise a full mix, but they are separated by instrument or sound group.] that’s how our records came into existence, we started performing together 2019 and still are… I love him, he’s like a bro to me ,we have a strong connection. He listens to my gut, I listen to his, that’s how we create dope music ,we are comfortable with each other which is very important.

INTERVIEW WITH DEBMASTER

Debmaster, you’ve been working with MC Yallah since 2018. Tell us about your first meeting.

Our first meeting was completely musical because Nyege Nyege asked us to work together remotely to see what it would sound like. When Arlen (one of the founders of the label) sent me a live video of Yallah from his track Ndete, I was sold in 2 seconds. We worked on a first EP called Ndi Mukazi. We were delighted and we naturally released Kubali very quickly, and that’s when we started thinking about concerts.

Describe your work together. How do you create new songs? Do you work together on sounds?

We started working remotely, she was in Uganda, I was in Berlin. We chatted a lot on Whatsapp during the process. Yallah would very quickly choose a group of beats from those I was producing on a daily basis and very quickly record something incredible at the DIY Studio in Kampala called “La villa Nyege”. The vocal tracks were sent to me so I could take inspiration from what Yallah brought and do some ‘post production’ work but we always tried to remain very spontaneous in our tracks. The tracks Kubali and Dunia were finished in a day.

Since 2015 you’ve been part of Nyege Nyege, a collective in Kampala that promotes other people’s music, primarily electronic music. How would you describe Nyege Nyege for those who don’t know it?

I’d say “Go there, check out the festival”. These are people who go out and find inspirational people and who themselves inspire everyone else. I’m a fan of so many artists on this label and, like you, I’m discovering sounds and rhythms from countries I didn’t know very well. A visit to the Nyege Music YouTube channel is a good way of discovering a lot of great stuff, like Singeli from Tanzania, crazy Balani from Mali, gqom from South Africa and other stuff from Kampala, Kenya, Congo and lots of other places.

I’ve also seen these people collaborate together, like one day, this spontaneous duet between Dj Diaki (from Mali) and Jay Mita (from Tanzania), the result was incredible and it was obvious from the smiles !

How is Nyege Nyege music different from other styles of electronic music?

I think a lot of electronic musicians at the moment are inspired by what’s going on at Nyege Nyege. Maybe the difference comes from the pleasure we all get from being a bit ‘extreme’ with our sound – it’s more fun and exciting for us than things that are well-produced and sometimes smooth. The positive feedback also gave us a kind of authorisation to go straight for sounds that were a bit more ‘punk’ than usual. And I don’t want to speak on behalf of the founders of the label, but I felt that they wanted to show a different side of Africa. There were a lot of things that were a bit slick and “afro tech” and “afro house” nights that weren’t always incredible and sometimes the word “afro” was more of a gimmick than anything else.

Your first steps in this world were when you were invited to send ‘beats’ for artists who were recording music in a studio in Kampala. How did you come to create music for these artists?

Initially, I was invited to play at the festival but while waiting for me to At first I was invited to play at the festival but while waiting for my arrival, I was asked to send in some beats. The idea of the Nyege Nyege Tapes label and then Hakuna Kulala came about during this period when other people were also producing things like Rey Sapienz, Kampire, Slikback, Disco Wumbi and Riddlore (an American rapper friend of mine who I’d been producing for years, which is how they discovered me). And during this process, we all listened to what was going on with the others and we all inspired each other. Don Zilla, for example, was the sound engineer at ‘la villa’ and it was at this point that he decided to produce his own music (2 great releases from him on Hakuna Kulala). I’ve produced stuff for Willstone & Lebon, Biga Yut, Joey Le Soldat then Yallah, Ecko Bazz, Ratigan and other names that don’t exist yet, it’s all in the pipeline 🙂

How did this studio in Kampala find you? Had you visited Uganda before?

As mentioned earlier, they ‘found’ me through my productions for the artist Riddlore, one of the founding members of a crew in Los Angeles called Chilling Villain Empire (CVE, a vinyl of their work was released on Hakuna Kulala). In fact, Arlen (again him) was listening to the same style of very creative hip hop around 2000-2006, something I noticed later. And no, I hadn’t been to Kampala at all before, my only experience of Africa was a year in Cairo in 2008 where I met some great people like this Oud artist called Mohamed Abozekry (he was 15 at the time!).

You’ve been based in Berlin for 12 years. MC Yallah is from Uganda. Where do you work together on new music when you’re not touring? What language do you work in together?

Berlin will soon be 14 years old! We communicate in English and we sometimes have the opportunity to work together during day offs (a residency in France, for example). But we continue to work remotely because we’ve naturally developed a workflow that functions well. The COVID period, even though it was terrible, didn’t change much in our way of working. Just yesterday we were working on a new song, we like to work in the same room but we can also work remotely. Our first concerts together were based on this way of working and when we were on stage we felt that everything was working perfectly and the pleasure of the concerts inspired us even more. The same thing will happen at WOMAD, we’ll be performing tracks that we produced remotely, and the pleasure of playing them together afterwards is unique.

How would you describe your music?

I’ve always tried to be free and let myself go in my sound compositions. I try to avoid recipes, which is sometimes complicated because sound and a good mix have ‘rules’. Sometimes I’ll completely destroy a track that’s too well mixed to avoid boredom and Yallah encourages me to do just that; together we’ve worked out that if it’s special, it’s automatically more interesting. Sometimes we laugh together about certain tracks and say “we don’t know exactly what this is – space music?”. We try to surprise each other and playing the tracks live allows us to deliver that special energy while making our own creations our own, Yallah’s way of rapping is sometimes different live because she’s had time to think and test variations in tone etc. That’s what drives me to do the same thing.

Nyege also asked me to produce Dancehall for an artist who hadn’t yet been released, and I replied “but I don’t know how to do dancehall myself” and they said “that’s precisely why it will be interesting”. The same goes for trap music, I sometimes use certain elements of this style of music but as it’s really a bit of an academic style, I always try to make a version that’s a bit more interesting than the classic recipe. But I don’t consider myself to be a ‘good producer’. Not being ‘specialised’ allows me to try out a lot of things.

Have you ever been to Adelaide together or separately?

Actually, our first time in Australia was in Adelaide in August 2022! The Unsound Festival (Poland) invited us to play at the Dom Polski Centre for Illuminate Festival, our friend Slikback was there and we have great memories of the city in general, we can’t wait to come back.

What can Australian audiences expect from your performances at WOMADelaide, Pitch Festival and Art After Dark in Sydney?

Endless energy and an amazing MC Yallah and new songs that no one has heard before because we’re constantly producing new stuff to play live, so we’ll see the next releases later, we always play the songs live well before the releases, it allows us to feel if the songs are good, the audience helps us a lot with that.

Anything else you’d like to tell us, Debmaster?

Just thank you and we’re looking forward to feeling your energy after this winter (yes, it’s winter over here).

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We thank MC Yallah and Debmaster for these interviews.