Santuri Safari: Pop Up Studio At Sondeka Festival

If you’re a music lover or a musician who likes to jam while collaborating with other musicians, then you can’t afford to miss the Sondeka Festival this weekend. There you’ll get to meet Santuri Safari, a collaborative platform for East African DJs, producers and musicians.

What Santuri Safari will do this week is run a six day workshop around the festival and have different musicians, DJs and singers collaborate on as many tracks as possible. Later, their team of producers will take the raw files and make different versions of the same recordings which will then be played around the festival.

Santuri Safari’s aim is to create fresh, dynamic new music with a strong East African identity. They therefore, fuse traditional instruments, rhythms and cultures with modern electronic sounds and dance culture. They have so far built pop up studios in Zanzibar, Jinja, Kampala, Rift Valley Festival and now they come to Nairobi.

Santuri is the Swahili word for Vinyl while “Sondeka” is sheng for “create”. These two will marry this weekend so well that their expected outcome this week gives us at UP the shivers.

The workshops will see Tony Nwachukwu of CDR/London and Sam Jones of SoundThread UK work with young producers, DJs and sound engineers from all over the region, sharing insights and developing skills around sound recording, music production and other related topics. Some of the guests will include Sarabi, DJ Zhao (Berlin), Dunga (Tz), Ugandan DJs Ivo, Rachael Makadem and Dark Meme, as well local talent such as Wasengo, Mr Jake and Dread Steppa.

Santuri Safari is supported by Ableton, Native Instruments and Nairobi institutions Creatives Garage, The Nest and Ketebul Music.