THE CENTRE IS ELSEWHERE: HAKUNA KULALA AND THE GLOBAL CLUB SCENE

words by GIULIA MARIA SCROCCHI

Put on Akiid's Skeffu — just out on Hakuna Kulala — and something happens that's hard to name but impossible to tune out. The Durban producer builds eleven tracks that move like memory: gqom's skeletal pulse underneath, but also something more diffuse, more restless, edges dissolving into a global club continuum he clearly absorbed by just listening very hard for a very long time. It doesn't sound like something trying to reach you. It sounds like it was already here.

That feeling, of music that wasn't waiting for Western discovery, is the central tension running through electronic music right now. And Hakuna Kulala, the Kampala-based label that sits within the wider Nyege Nyege ecosystem, has become one of its most articulate expressions.

Founded in Uganda and operating across East Africa and beyond, Hakuna Kulala has spent the last several years doing something quietly radical: establishing its own centre of gravity. Its catalogue reads like a genre map of a world that doesn't have a centre. Nsasi's Coinage distorts traditional East African rhythm into industrial techno-adjacent pressure. MC Yallah and Debmaster's Gaudencia navigates a dizzying orbit between rap, noise, and forward-facing electronics. NET GALA brings Korean ballroom energy into the frame, reconfigures loose genre signifiers and queer cultural references. Violence Gratuite filters Cameroonian folk through no-wave and chanson. None of it sounds like “world music”, that patronising umbrella term that long served as a holding pen for everything that didn't fit the Euro-American canon. What unifies it isn't style. It's an insistence on experimentation, locality, and sonic autonomy. Not a mission statement, but a byproduct: the result of being drawn to artists whose music tells you how to listen to it, rather than fitting neatly into a category that already exists. Saying "East African electronic music isn't wrong [as a description, ed.], but it mostly tells you where to place the music on a map. It doesn't tell you much about what is actually happening inside the track"— and the creative buzz that's happening around it.

What it sounds like, if anything, is a new kind of folk art. A term Shawn Reynaldo uses to describe electronic music that has abandoned techno-utopian abstraction in favour of something rooted, collective, and tied to lived experience. Which raises a question: what does it really mean to be rooted? Music that comes out of ceremonies, street dances, MC battles, sound systems, informal economies. Not (or not only) an abstract/deconstructed idea of club music, but actual social worlds. The older story about electronic music was always futurist: the machine as escape velocity, the dancefloor as somewhere other than here. But there's more to it. The more interesting story being told now is also the older one: a Black community reasserting its place at the centre of a music whose foundations it actually built.

Detroit techno was always Black music. House music was always Black music. And there it is. The way those genealogies got absorbed, whitened, and exported back as European techno culture is one of the more uncomfortable chapters in the history of the underground. What's happening now — through gqom, singeli, kuduro, amapiano, and dozens of other forms that European tastemakers are scrambling to contextualise — is something that looks, from one angle, like a correction.

Here's where it gets more complex than it might seem.

There's an obvious risk in the way certain media circuits have approached these scenes, framing them through the language of “discovery". As if Durban's club culture or Dar es Salaam's singeli nights needed a European-based journalist to exist? The issue isn't that European audiences are paying attention. That's fine, that can be generative. The issue is the grammar that often surrounds that attention like “we found this. we are giving this to you.”

“Facts: that track reached you precisely because it was already circulating.” It was already mutating, already going at full intensity, felt firstly from the people themselves, from the closest-knit community. The outside attention changes the visibility, not the fact of the music existing. The “explosion” happened in the pages of the media. These sounds have long been moving through transnational diasporic networks, shaped by the kind of cultural exchange that Paul Gilroy described decades ago: not bounded by nation, not owned by geography, but moving through something more like kinship. And as for the last few decades, the internet didn't invent this circulation, it just made it perceived as “bigger” and harder to ignore.

What's changed is the position in the symbolic hierarchy. To use Sarah Thornton's framework, the subcultural capital within European underground circles has been quietly restructured. Knowing singeli, kuduro, your Hakuna Kulala back catalogue has become a new marker of credibility; which is fine, except it means these scenes are now being valued partly for what they represent for other (...and mostly white) people's cultural identity, rather than on their own terms. That demand takes more than one form: sometimes the circuit wants the clean version, the one that explains itself before it hits; sometimes it wants the opposite, the most "authentic" version possible, which is its own impossible ask. Europe, is in fact, a telling example of this, an audience that can be genuinely curious, sometimes more open than anywhere else, while its dominant music production remains surprisingly conservative (and here please also bear in mind that the writer is Italian) conservative. The negotiation never really ends: “You just have to keep checking you're not slowly becoming the version of yourself that travels easiest."

Akiid's trajectory makes this tension even more tangible. He spent his childhood moving between townships, absorbing rhythms that didn't belong to any single place, then spent years synthesising them into something that does belong to him, specifically, completely. Skeffu sits comfortably within that lineage: rooted in Durban's gqom tradition but constantly leaking beyond it, pulling fragments from ambient music, broken rhythms and contemporary club mutations into a sound that feels both deeply local and impossible to geographically pin down. For these artists, specific place and globally circulating sound were never opposites but the condition they started from.

That's the distinction that keeps getting lost in translation. Not "where is the innovation happening" but who gets to say so, and for whom does it exist in the first place.

Rooted doesn't mean backward-looking. These genres are abstract, fast-moving, unstable, they change faster than the language used to describe them. For twenty years, Europe imagined itself as the centre of electronic innovation. Today, many of the most vital genres originate elsewhere and arrive in Europe not as peripheral influences but as main actors. The question is no longer how Europe interprets these sounds, but how it repositions itself within a musical ecosystem it no longer fully controls. 

The centre isn't moving. It was never there to begin with.

Quotes by Arlen, founder of Hakuna Kulala, from a conversation with the author.