Considering world music’s long-time love affair with African music, there are still areas of the continent that have had little to no coverage on the international scene. One of those places is Chad. A new project, Pulo NDJ, aims to bring the country’s music to the world through the lens of the New York club scene.
When djbuosis, founder of the cultural exchange platform HAPE Collective, visited Chad to meet some musicians and record some demos, he noticed the people’s passion for music but an almost complete lack of any recorded music industry or infrastructure. So in May 2018, he invited New York-based DJ and producer Nickodemus to come to the capital, N’Djamena, teach a few DJing workshops for kids and record a bunch of musicians.
As the musicians turned up for the recording sessions, word got around. “It just kept growing and growing, I was amazed! I didn’t expect so many people to turn up with ideas, wanting to be involved,” says Nickodemus. It wasn’t an option to let this music go unrecorded, and the improvised studio space became a hive of activity. “This was a huge opportunity for them to finally get some music out there into the world. So we went into overdrive with the coffee and we stayed awake late into the night, every night, to help record and make new songs.”
Some people brought programmed beats, some brought traditional songs. There were synthesisers and electric guitars bumping against traditional lutes and xylophones. With so many exciting musical ideas being thrown around, they started to solidify into full pieces, and soon there was an outline for an album that no-one had set out to record.
Pulo NDJ reflect the sounds of N’Djamena – a cosmopolitan city whose musicians come from all over the region. The main group are all key figures in the city’s live music scene: Idriss, a N’Djamena native; Samy and Wahlid, both from Cameroon; Stingo from Togo; and then there were others from every corners of the country.
Then it was up to Nickodemus to put his own stamp on it. “It really is a beautiful, collaborative project,” he says. “After we did all the writing and recording, all I did was take it home and get nerdy with it, adding the delays and the compressions and all the panning. They were super open to it. They were so happy not only to have their songs recorded, but also to have them flipped and sampled. Everything was open to interpretation and they were very open to getting it in the club.” The results became the album Desert to Douala, just released on Wonderwheel Recordings.
And now, the project is turning into a band. With the help of djbuosis, they’ve already planned a tour of West Africa, and they’ve got their eyes on playing even further abroad. From making a record to forming a band, the adventure of Pulo NDJ has been one of surprises, but that’s to be expected when you’re representing a country as yet unknown on the international stage. Now Chad is making its voice heard.
Photo: Pulo NDJ, by Clotilde Bertet.